The man poked my elbow and motioned towards my phone as he said it. We had been seat neighbors for about two hours, but aside from him offering me a mint earlier (I declined), we hadn't interacted at all.
"Hmm, it's 10:30," I replied. He nodded.
"How long is this supposed to last?" he again queried me. Apparently he, along with the rest of the room, hadn't found the endurance to pay attention to the 15-minute shpeel they so kindly rolled for us at the beginning of our wait.
"I think we're here 'til twelve."
"Jury duty. Man, I tell you. I can think of a lot o' better things I could be doing right now." He seemed to be on a roll now that he'd breached the silence. "I wish I'da known it was gonna take this long. Woulda eaten a bigger breakfast." He wasn't talking loudly, but the fidgety lady four chairs down stood and brushed by us, annoyed at the sudden disruption of quiet.
"And how are you, young lady?" my new friend asked as she passed. She showed no recognition of his sociable gesture and kept walking.
"Ah, well," he turned to me again. "She must not be doin' too good then."
His dark skin didn't look too weathered, though as I later learned, he'll turn 70 next month. Before he'd asked me the time, I'd noticed him pull out a copy of "Crazy Love" from the basket of his walker. Now the book was back in its spot and he wore a pair of tortoise-shell shades to block out the sun from the bright room. He sat with his feet propped up on the walker, hands folded comfortably in his lap. This amusing individual seemed quite at his leisure to now launch into an inescapable, one-sided conversation. Inescapable because I didn't have the heart to leave like our neighbor had. One-sided because, although I appreciated the respite from my [unsuccessful] quest to do something productive on my smart phone, I felt a little awkward carrying on a conversation with a man three times my age while an entire room of bored, anxious, fellow jurors undoubtedly listened and judged.
"You a student?"
"Umm...yeah."
"Where at?"
"Well, actually I'm just doing some traveling right now. Missions work."
"Ahhh..." He smiled. "So you know our Father. Daddy, I like to call Him."
I nodded and gave a small smile. I was intrigued; so happy to hear a stranger talk about Jesus this way. But I didn't really know how to respond. I never do. God is everything to me, yet the usual Christian responses are just so cheesy. What was I supposed to say? Amen, brother! Boy, ain't the Lord good.
"You know, if Daddy weren't love like He is, I wouldn't be worth anything. I'd just explode all the time, frustrated and all, yet here I am, calm and collected. He covers all that frustration with peace."
I was eating it up. I loved hearing him talk like that and I was beginning to shed my initial hesitation to talk to him. Still, my face only showed a polite amount of interest.
"I used to play the blame game with God. Gettin' all mad at Him for everything. But I just finally realized He's large and in charge. So now I just get out of His way and let Him do what He wants. What time is it now?"
I looked at my phone again. "Eleven oh one."
"One more hour!" he cheered.
We continued to talk, him a lot, me a little. Soon I learned that this man whom I'd known for all of an hour went to Tokyo in 1977 on a Buddhist pilgrimage, loves fried chicken, was planning on getting a beer and meatball sub just as soon as this waiting thing was over, and although he wore a silver band on his left hand, was not indeed married and apparently lived alone.
By 11:15, a lady came in to announce who had been selected for the jury. By the end of the list, my friend's number had been called: 977.
The room stirred as people stood and stretched. The man, whose name I never caught, gathered his cane and walker and began to make his way down the aisle. But just then he stopped, turned to me with his sunglasses and a big grin, and gave me a wave. And then he disappeared into the crowd, faded blue ball cap and all. I guess I'll never forget him, because humans make a bigger impact on other humans than we ever dare to believe.
.JPG)