Kismet in Exit Row

At 3:30 PM on Tuesday, I discovered Fate had decided to thwart me off my course.

I was flying home from an out-of-town reporting assignment. The first leg of my journey was smooth sailing (so to speak), but the second was in jeopardy. There was a 1.5 hours delay, which would make me miss my connecting flight for the home stretch. In a calm, indifferent demeanor I found highly insulting, the airline's customer service rep told me that, by the time I landed in Vegas, all the outbound flights for San Francisco would have already left, leaving me with no choice but to spend the night at the airport, amidst a chorus of slot machines.

Then my guardian angel intervened. With a few keystrokes on the computer, a hefty supervisor named Wendy rewrote my destiny (and my boarding passes). She put me on a direct flight to San Francisco, bypassing Sin City altogether. With this small gesture, she had unknowingly put me in a seat in the Exit Row next to Frankie, a photographer who would capture my imagination without a camera.

Frankie had short, rippled hair that flowed like an unruly river, where griffins dipped their wings and washed their beaks. Its color reminded me of Sangria, mixed with a measure of Homer's wine-dark sea. The tattooed image of a femme fatale in trenchcoat and fedora (the original was by a French artist, she later told me) sprawled across her right arm.

"Are you just visiting Houston? Or from here?" she asked.
"I'm just passing through. This is my stopover," I said.
"Oh, where did you come from?" she asked.

Somehow, I found myself unable to recall my point of origin. Like a bumbling idiot, I had to look at my ticket to figure it out.

"I was in Orlando," I said.
"I'd just been on a road trip," she said.

She showed me a series of photos on her iPhone. As she brushed her fingers on the device's surface (marked by two large intersecting cracks), the Arizona plains and the clear blue sky flashed by. Watching heaven and earth tumble like playthings at her fingertips, I remembered the famous lines by Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Her road trip, Frankie revealed, was a bit of a letdown. She had misjudged her traveling companions' spirit of exploration.

"Like, when we were in Nashville or Texas, I would have Yelped for good places to eat, then checked them out," she said. But her fellow travelers preferred to stick to the familiar, so she went along, swallowing a series of bland meals in nondescript roadside diners.

When the stewardesses brought the food cart out, she bit down on the frosty cheese burger, as if it were her revenge for the gas-station sandwiches she'd been made to eat for the past two weeks.

"You want a piece of chocolate?" she offered, picking up the last item on her tray. I didn't have the heart to rob her of her Lilliputian desert.
"Go for it," I said.

By the time complimentary beverages arrived, we were deeply engaged in a philosophical discussion, spanning Shamanism, Buddhism, Adam and Eve, and Original Sin (all stemming from a chapter in The Road Less Traveled, the book she'd brought along).

"Let's try something," I suggested. "Let's see if we can take turn guessing something about each other."
"OK," she said. "I think, in the last year, you ended a relationship that lasted more than four years."
"I was disappointed by a relationship," I told her, "because it was unrequited. I wanted it more than she did."
"Unrequited," she repeated. "I think I'd heard it only three of four times in my life."

Then it was my turn.

"I think you're still friends with the first guy who's ever broke your heart," I said.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because you just seem like you have what it takes to work though something like that to retain a friendship," I said.

I was right on this account, she confirmed.

"I think you speak at least three languages," she said.

She got that one right, I confirmed.

"I think the first tattoo you've ever had was the name of someone," I said.
"Nope," she said. "It's the Libra sign."

She leaned over and showed me the tiny mark on her nape. The symbol drawn in maroon ink shone under the dim cabin-light like an Egyptian cuneiform, an oracle from the sun god Ra.

"My sister was supposed to get one like this," she said. "But she didn't."
"So it was an unrequited tattoo," I said, which prompted a giggle.

Then we decided to play my other favorite game: Pretend to be someone else. We agreed that, for the remainder of the flight, we'd both take on fictional personas. She chose to be Ruth, who was adopted when she was a little girl; I chose to retain my real name but play the son of her neighbor who moved away, launched a dot-com, lost everything he had, then moved back to his hometown.

"So what kind of dot-com did you start?" she began.
"It was a dating site," I said.
"Why did it fail?"
"I had this idea that people would like a dating site where they have to be honest about who they are. But it seems most people would rather date others based on illusions and fantasies. So they logged off without even finishing the questionnaire."
"What's that site called?"
"Downwithcupid.com."
"I think I had a profile there once."

On the flickering video monitor, the plot of The Pink Panther 2 thickened, taking Inspector Clouseau through the maze of Paris. In the two isolated seats in the Exit Row, we wrote our own plot. Before the seat-belt sign came back on, I managed to create a brother who had a crush on her; Frankie returned the favor by conjuring up an exboyfriend who died from inhaling paint. Then Frankie, in character as Ruth, offered to work for me as a bookkeeper for the bed and breakfast I was thinking of buying and running. That was when we felt the touchdown.

Now that cellphones were permitted once again, she pinged me to put her number in my phone. I saved it with the name Ruth.

"Don't you remember my name?" she asked
"I'm not likely to forget a name like Frankie," I told her.
"I think this is kismet," she said.

It was a term I was oblivious to.

"What's that?" I asked.
"Kismet, like Destiny," she replied.

About 12 hours after our goodbye hug, Frankie and I became buddies on Facebook. Maybe, one day, we'll revive the story of Ruth over coffee, argue over the wallpaper patterns for the imaginary bed and breakfast I would buy and she would manage, and discuss plans to relaunch Downwithcupid.com.

When I blog about someone, I usually ask for the person's permission and use a nickname only. But Frankie gave me her blessings not only to write about our meeting but identify her by her real name.

So meet Frankie, or her alter ego Ruth, at this site.