Something I have not experienced in quite a while is how lovely it can be to get to know the person sitting next to me on the plane.

On the first leg of our trip from Dallas Fort Worth Airport to George Bush Intercontinental Airport, I sat next to a lovely woman named Charlene Whitaker who was on her way home to Lexington, Kentucky.

She never told me her name, except her first name when I offered my hand to her and introduced myself as we were preparing to de-board. I gathered the last name from seeing her husband’s last name on her phone when she was trying to find an email to show me a photo of one of her horses.

People just tell me stuff. Which can come in very handy when working as a therapist in a big ol’ high school. I guess that means that they find me to be an active and engaged listener. Which makes my work a lot more effective. My husband finds it very funny when, after just standing in line briefly with someone, I can tell him afterward all about their current health status, how their day at work was, and what has helped them the most with their low back pain over the years.

Anyway, back to Charlene. Her husband’s career has been with Gannett’s Newspaper Division, and that work has allowed them to move around quite a bit. He worked for The Times in Shreveport, Louisiana as well as newspapers in New Jersey, Mississippi, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, and beyond. Somewhere along the way, they became involved in Thoroughbred horse breeding and racing and have had a few pretty successful horses. Mr. Gary B. was one of those. Lil Evie is another. Currently, they are training Mr. Gary B.’s relative to race as well as another horse named Regatta Bay. Larry, her husband, saw that name on a sign somewhere once when they were traveling and thought it sounded like a nice name for a horse. So it is now – and not coincidentally, it is a horse with a bay coat. How ’bout that?

We talked about the hair-pulling frustration of remodeling a home after water damage and the delight of getting things just the way you want them despite all the setbacks that inevitably accompany such an undertaking. She loved her work in the architecture business, and at least one of her adult children is an architect.

It was a delight – not a bother in any way, shape or form – to sit and converse with her.

I asked if we choose seats where Mike and I were each on the aisle and A could have a seat by one of the windows on the same row. That worked for all the flights on the way here.

So, on the Houston to Miami leg, A was on my row by the window, and I was on the aisle. A lovely young woman named Laura S. sat between us. Laura was on her way home to Medellín after a trip to San Francisco. I don’t even remember who spoke first, but for just the right amount of time at the beginning of the flight, she and I carried on a lively conversation in Spanish, and she and A did the same. This experience with being bilingual is exactly what I wanted for him while traveling to a Spanish-speaking country. He has always been hesitant to speak his second language with me, and I have never forced him to do so — I always felt like that would do more harm than good. He was in a dual language program from kindergarten through sixth grade, skipped a year of Spanish instruction in 7th grade, and then was in the Spanish for Spanish Speakers class as an 8th grader. Those middle school years’ changes were due to our moving from the school district he grew up in, to the one where we live now (and I work). He understands the language pretty well, but he struggles with the confidence to speak it as well as he knows how. I think a fair amount of the confidence issues stems from having native speakers (adolescents, not adults — most of them are absolutely impressed, nay, enchanted) ridicule and taunt him, telling him things like, “You just used Google translate to know how to say that.” Jack-wagon adolescents.

Anyway, Laura offered me her phone number in case I had any questions while we were here, and she said that she would send me some suggestions for things to do and places to eat via WhatsApp. And you know what? She did. She shared some links and told me why she made those recommendations and left me a few voice memos with further details. Unfortunately, she had had some kind of accident after arriving in Medellín and had to go to the hospital.

Anyway, Laura was an absolute delight, and I could not have asked for a better seatmate for me and A all the way from Miami to Medellín.

People just tell me stuff.

And in the case of these few days, absolutely none of it provoked a surge of vicarious trauma.