Here I sit in a restaurant at the airport. My flight is seven hours away. In the restaurant, I picked a corner where ensconced in a sofa I could stay undisturbed for seven hours. On the table in front of me lie two local dailies. One carries the headline, “Pack of Lies!”, the other, “Hocus Pocus.” I decide to read the first–and, because the waiter has given me a sharp look, order food–only later.
Through the glass wall of the restaurant I can see the flag on a pole. Its soft flutter assures me that the breezes have replaced the gusts that last night pried and put in moans through the windows of the hotel. The rice fields that stretch along the front of the airport and the trees and bamboo groves beyond them seem equally at peace, confirming my personal weather forecast of a better day.
A man and his three-year-sold son join me in the corner. They take an equally tender seat near the sofa. The man picks up the newspaper, the one with the headline, “Pack of Lies!” and begins reading. The boy stands beside him and looks at the same page and after a while starts to cry, which makes me curious as to what exactly is said in the newspaper and resolve to read it after the man.
And then it begins to rain. The view outside becomes hazy. I withdraw into my thoughts.
Meanwhile the newspaper disappears. While I was not looking someone else had taken it. It was the oldish man three tables away, who now reads it, rocking his feet all the while, which only calls attention to their socklessness.
I am not particularly religious but I like reading the Gospels. Everyday I pick a short passage from the Bible which I have downloaded into my iPhone. With the outside view hidden by rain and the newspaper still in the hands of the man with the restless and sockless feet, a paragraph or two from John seems in order, and as if to make reading it an act of mental relaxation as well, a little Zen fountain keeps gently gurgling on a table beside me.
And so I chance upon these words of Jesus: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
When they heard this the Jews asked themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
And Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”
Food is roughly the topic in this excerpt from John. Food and, yes, life, and how nice that I should read it in a restaurant, which also sells T-shirts and straw hats, and lets in birds as guests.
Yes, birds. But surely this happens only accidentally. Just minutes after I entered a sparrow flew in and hopped on the floor between the tables.
There was a man having coffee but he did not mind the bird which lolloped near his feet, which at least he did not rock.
I stood up to get a better view of the sparrow, and this must have alerted the bird–it flew towards the rice fields. But it was stopped by the glass.
Though the thud of impact was not loud, the size of the bird taken into account, it must have sprained its wishbone. This told me something about sparrows, that like people they need to be reminded of the presence of glass, and that not everything the eyes see is always accessible.
Nonetheless, birds take time to learn their lesson. The sparrow made three more similar attempts with three more similar results and a total of four sprains because it takes a wish to break a wishbone (incidentally, the thought of sprains reminds me to take my aspirin).
At last I decided to take action and shooed the sparrow towards the door. The sparrow finally found its way to the outside and flew in the direction of the flagpole and the fields.
I don’t know what the bird came into the restaurant for, but surely it was not something on the menu. In this we had something in common. I, too, entered the diner not for the food. If I thought of ordering it this was just to legitimize my stay. Neither was it just to compose or relax myself beside the gurgling little Zen fountain.
It is now towards lunchtime. I am ready to order. But already I obtained nourishment in the passage from John. Why deny it? My faith tells me that the consecrated bread and wine are in substance the body and blood of Jesus, which I receive at Holy Communion, and which Jesus was talking about in the Gospel of John. This food is ultimately what I need. As for the bird, whatever seed or fruit it favors, perhaps some other food awaits it too, beyond the fields and the rain.
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