Single Serving Friend

[Originally written 6/23]
Edward Norton once told me that everything on a plane is single-serving, including your friendship with the person seated next to you. I met a pretty good single-serving friend on the transatlantic flight to Heathrow. She was a lovely 68-year-old Hungarian woman named Julie. Her accent was sometimes difficult to understand, but Julie was a very close talker, so things balanced out. The highlight of her resume was her assistance to a nobel prize winning neurobiologist (now deceased). They performed hippocampus experiments on cats and rhesus monkeys, and she was in charge of anesthesiology. Julie was quite pleased when I knew that the hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for short-term memory, and went on to discuss injection and electrode implantation. She also offered that Rhesus monkeys were valuable research subjects because they were unusually "resilient." Gotta love 1960's science.

After mentioning God's role in a few of her good career decisions, she asked me bluntly whether I was a believer. I try to be frank and shameless in this department, so I told her and I'll tell you that no, I don't believe in God. The rest of conversation was dedicated to our friendly discussion of religion and atheism. She was apparently an atheist herself until age 50. Not to brag, but before all was said and done, she told me that she would be proud if I were her grandson. That went a long way toward cementing my belief that religion does not need to be a taboo subject among open-minded and tactful people.

I really liked Julie, so I'll forward her advice to me (though I do not advocate it): read Psalm 139 over and over until it has some impact on your life. After reading it twice, I slept really well on the plane and had zero jetlag. Sky's the limit.