On this inferno of a late afternoon, I am sitting by a courtyard fountain reading a Spanish phrasebook, and there must be something about another person reading a book when you are bored out of your mind that makes you want to talk to them. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her leave a perfectly good conversational huddle with a fellow Ozzie and a guy from Texas (OK, so I myself have been eavesdropping.) She scrapes a plastic chair across the entire length of the courtyard to sit next to me.
After the first chair Iâve managed to keep my head intently in the book without looking up, but then she starts moving a second plastic chair into the conversational theater. I buckle. I have to see why two chairs, so I look up. I kick myself for exposing myself to eye contact, but at this point the battle is over. Iâve been flanked.
As I look up, the woman, an Australian named Debbie, gives me a big wide, friendly smile that was not going to take no for an answer, and I canât help but smile back, and just like that I am beaten.
Goodbye phrase book.
Goodbye Type II Spanish verb conjugations.
I should add that I had made a conditional agreement with myself before buying this reverse Learn English for Spaniards phrasebook in a bookstore in Jaca. I was going to let myself break the no-project pilgrimage rule if, and this is a big if I told myself, if I didnât let it get in the way of just hanging out with people and being present, practically the whole point of my pilgrimage. Weâve been through all of this already, and it didnât help.
The point wasnât trying to learn Spanish in a month. Well, here we are a month and a half in. Perfect example. Two white plastic chairs later and a friendly Australian, Debbie, who pronounces her name Dibbie, clearly wants to talk to me, needs to talk to me, is going to talk to me. The mystery of the second plastic chair remains completely unresolved. I have no idea what expanse of conversation opens up behind the door to that question.
Then after no more than a couple minutes, and I mean she doesnât have three general facts on me, she asks me suddenly, and totally out of the blue:
âDo you know Suzanne?â
Now, by the time you get to the middle of Spain, and all the pilgrimage routes start to run together, there are a lot of people out there on the Camino.
Thousands at any one time are filing in from all over the place. Itâs like the Euro Disney parking lot. Itâs like the Greater Mecca Ring Road. You only recognize a fraction of them because there are hundreds of new faces every day. So, with no exaggeration Iâm telling you there must be fifty Suzannes walking the thing at any point, and I donât know what to say for a moment, and I canât think of any Suzannes Iâve met either. And Iâve only just met this woman three minutes ago.
âSu-zanne,â she goes on cheerfully, as if the hard accent on the second syllable clears everything up. I take that inflection to mean â correctly, it turns out â that she wants to narrow it down from do I know Suzanne from the entire Camino to do I know Suzanne from the Entire World.
Well, weâve all had these conversations.
You knit your brow and go hmmm to show good faith, and then say you guess you donât know their motherâs college friend. You are as surprised as they are. You apologize for the size of wherever it is youâre from, and you explain that there are actually a lot of people wherever that happens to be, which in my case is New Jersey, a fact that throws people because it looks really small and peanut-sized on the map.
âNoooooooooo, Suzanne and Hinry.â
Well, Iâll be damned.
I do know Suzanne and âHinry.â
And what is even more curious, so do you. I know this because I introduced you earlier. Remember when I shared the whole long, involved thing about my boots, and how I had this friend who said I needed to buy a new pair like right this minute, stat, and it was just around Christmas, and then I did buy them and all the rest of it?
Well, that was Henry.
His wife is Suzanne.
They are our neighbors across the street on Bainbridge Island.
So, before I forget, I want to say that if you are ever in Australia, please say hello to Dibbie for me. If thereâs one thing Iâve learned about the Camino, itâs that you will run into her.
