by Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist, and novelist. This poem was published in Peacework Magazine, Issue 382 - February 2008

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately." Well -- one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. "Help," said the Flight Service Person. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this." I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. "Shu dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, "You're fine, you'll get there, who is picking you up? Let's call him." We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her -- Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag -- and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands -- had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped -- seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

I don't know how to be thirtysomething.

Caught between my twenties and my forties--between young adulthood and, well, just plain adulthood--I'm perplexed.

I think part of the reason for my confusion is that I am a church-going Christian, and I also happen to work for the church. And, as we all know, it's the thirtysomethings that are largely missing from the church. So the two places where I spend most of my time are virtually thirtysomethingless.

All you twentysomethings: am I romanticizing the decade I most recently left behind? Did I really know how to be twentysomething? Do you feel like you know how to fare this phase? I think having spent most of my twenties in school surrounded by other twentysomethings gave me a pretty good clue about what it meant to be twentysomething. And I'm sure it didn't hurt that most of the older adults in my life during that stage were used to working with twentysomethings.

But now I find myself in a strange no-woman's-land of missing thirtysomethings. There are a few of us around the church, but we're not quite as visible as the twentysomethings. And the older adults I'm encountering now don't seem to know quite what to do with the few of us that are here.

I love the intergenerational reality that is the mainline church. But I miss having space to be with other people my age. Most of the thirtysomethings I know are friends from other walks of life. We are figuring out together what it means to be thirty. But I find myself longing for a mentor, for a woman who's just a few more years into this decade than I am to take me by the hand and tell me that this uncertainly that I feel is normal. To assure me that I will eventually come to know what it is that I want to do with my life. To agree with me that the myth of the working supermother is both out-of-reach and dangerous. To challenge me to resist settling down if that means getting so tied to material things that I betray the truly important things.

Where are my fellow thirtysomethings? What does it mean to be thirtysomething? Have you figured it out? Who showed you the way?

Wow. That was a long--and unintentional--hiatus.

For some reason I've been blocked from accessing blogspot from my computer here at work. For several weeks. Access was finally restored again this afternoon.

So here I am, with a LOT on my mind. I'm ready to blog again. So stay tuned...

It's good to be back.