Stranger Things Have Happened

I love meeting people I have very little chance of seeing again. The kind of people you meet on your last day of college, or in a grocery store on the other side of town, or at a bike repair shop the day you sell your bike. 

It’s not that I enjoy that I might never see them again; in fact, I most often wish the opposite were true. But there’s something about meeting someone when there is no risk involved. You can laugh a bit too loudly, listen more than you’d usually care to, make a joke your friends wouldn’t have laughed at. 

I could have said no when my Airbnb host offered me a ride from the train station when I arrived in Teignmouth. My Airbnb was a mile away from the train station– surely I could have caught an uber or made the trek on foot with a suitcase and several bags of English biscuits in tow. But I had ignored that little voice in my ear reminding me of stranger danger (which sounded suspiciously like my mother) and said yes. 

She arrived on the wrong side of the road (to me at least) in what I can only describe as a quintessentially British car, throwing open her door before the car had even stopped. She was a flurry of waving hands, somehow managing to welcome me to Teignmouth, asking how my train ride was, and ordering me to ignore the spelling books in the car she needed to mark all in one breath. 

It took several moments before she took a pause long enough for me to get one word in edgewise. 

“Oh, you aren’t from here, are you?” she asked, stopping with one hand on the door handle of her car in what I could only assume was a rare moment of surprise. 

It wasn’t until later that I realized why my American accent had been a cause for curiosity. As we drove around the sleepy beach town, with its one major grocery store and two main streets half a mile in length, she told me about Teignmouth. 

I had found myself in one of many stops along the Great Western Railway, one of those town names most people knew as a short interruption on their journey to somewhere much more popular. Teignmouth was not a summer holiday destination, nor was it a particularly unsavory sort of place to be. It was one of those rare places that was best enjoyed by those who were willing to give it a chance. 

Maybe the fact that I knew nothing about Teignmouth made my host eager to share her beloved town, or maybe it was that the discovery that I was also a teacher provided some mutual respect, but regardless, I was asked to be the guest of honor at the following morning’s pilates class on the beach. 

That was how I found myself on the edge of a cliff overlooking the English Channel doing squats at 8am with a group of total strangers. 

Two others had joined us– each one at least twice my age, and twice my level of fitness– for a cloudy morning of exercise with ocean spray to our front and the beach’s main sidewalk to our back. My host walked us through each step, politely offering modifications to a man with an injury and (to my horror) me, while shouting out little tidbits she had gathered from me the day before in between moves. 

“Kiersten is a school teacher as well!” she’d lift her head up to say in between leg raises. “She came all the way from Texas and thinks the butter here is much better than it is in America!”

Seagulls flew past us, dark blue waves tossed and turned beneath us sleepily, neighboring cliffs of the towns to either side became richer in color as the sun continued to rise. And I thought about the pilates class I had taken before, with beige colored walls surrounding me, and how it could never compare to this.

 The retired lady on the far end took a group picture that is now somewhere in the digital cloud, where I’ll never see it, and told me about her daughter who lives in California. The only man in our group told me he swims in the sea every morning before he starts his day. They wanted to know what Texas was like, and if I liked being in England. 

I was sweating by the end of it, laughing at how sore I would be the next morning, and asking where I could find the best tea in town. 

But instead of parting ways and heading off on my own after what had already been a one-of-a-kind workout class, my Airbnb tossed me her car keys. 

“You can move my car if they try to give me a ticket for being in the wrong spot. I’ll be right back!” she called in her lovely accent. And yes, even British teachers use their teacher’s voice when giving orders. 

So I stayed put, wide-eyed and unsure whether or not I should remind her that I did not, in fact, know how to drive on this side of the road, when her husband arrived on his bike. 

Pilates on the beach apparently always ended with a coffee on the beach, which I was not about to argue with. 

So I squeezed beside the group on their usual bench and drank my hot mocha, seated across from her husband who gave me a knowing look every time his wife tossed another barrage of questions my way. We talked about America, and how I ought to take the train to the next town to try the best scones, and if I could help them sign up for a yoga class online because their phone wasn’t working. 

By the time we were done, the dregs of my mocha had gone cold, and the sky had gotten murky in that way most English skies do when rain is on its way, and my sore feet were beginning to protest from the workout after a week of walking nonstop through England. 

And it was the happiest I had felt in an entire year. 

It was there, on that bench, with people who I had only just met and was preparing to part with, that I realized why I love meeting strangers so much. 

It’s not because I know I have nothing to lose, or because I feel safe to be bad at pilates in front of people who have never seen me be good or bad at anything before. 

It’s not because I know I won’t see them again. 

It’s because, somehow, someway, I might.