Alone

I’ve read an old saying somewhere that you are never as alone as you are when you are in a room full of strangers. I would have to agree. If you’ve been reading my blog you will know that day before yesterday I had to attend a meeting relating to my job. I traveled 80 miles one way by myself to attend this meeting and sat in a room full of people and didn’t know any of them. Of course we all had the same purpose for being there and obviously we had the same career but most people had come with a co-worker wherein I was alone. When lunch came we had such a short amount of time that most of us just visited the cafeteria. Again, I sat in a room with a few hundred people and knew no one. I felt very alone and vulnerable.
Now I must explain that being alone is not something that normally bothers me, hence the picture of the train station today (I’ll explain in a minute). I am an only child that was raised in a small town with maybe one or two other children. I didn’t have any cousins or extended family to speak of. I was taught at an early age to occupy myself. As I grew up I longed for “girlfriends” to share shopping trips and gossip and I did have some of those but we drifted apart as we started raising our families. God blessed me with three sons so once again when it was time for me to go shopping for a new dress there was no one there to give their advice and I got used to it. As a matter of fact, most of the time I prefer to shop alone…it gives me the freedom to explore something that interests me or wander from shop to shop, thinking through my purchases and what works best for me.
For some reason though, on Tuesday I felt very alone…can’t pinpoint it, just did.
Anyway, I thought I would share a time with you when I was probably the most alone and vulnerable in my life and it worked out beautifully. When you finish reading my story I wish you would share with me a time when you were most alone….and made the best of it!
Several years ago my oldest son had to take a business trip to Paris. When he asked if I wanted to tag along I couldn’t say “yes!” fast enough. So my DIL and I were left to our own devices in Paris while my son took care of business except for one day. I had purchased the three of us train tickets out to Normandy to visit the American cemetery and see the beaches. We boarded the train early that morning and had a beautiful time watching the scenery go by. The train made stops at every little town we came through and we knew we were supposed to disembark in Bayeux (sp) where we would be picked up by our tour guide. You should know that the stop for each little town was announced in French and we frankly weren’t paying as close attention as we should have until it dawned on us that we were at our stop…as luck would have it, my DIL had just two minutes earlier stepped to the bathroom. My son said , “go ahead, get off, I’ll grab xxxx and we’ll be right behind you”. But it didn’t work that way, I stepped off the train and the doors slapped shut behind me and I looked up to see my son and DIL waving and motioning for me to stay where I was (as if I would try to do anything else). I can’t begin to describe how I felt seeing that train pull away and leave me standing there alone. Now if everything was going as planned, there should be a tour guide there, but there wasn’t. I sat down despondent on a bench trying to come up with a plan. Maybe we had completely gotten off at the wrong stop. How long would it take for my son to get back. I couldn’t speak a word of French and it was a pretty desolate looking place (the picture above is the actual train station, the little building on the right is where I sat down). I had no phone, couldn’t speak the language, I wasn't completely sure where I was and I didn’t know how to get home….pretty sad. I sat for a few minutes praying and suddenly this volkswagon van comes to a screeching halt in front of me. Out jumps a little French man with a sign bearing my last name. Hallelujah! In his broken English he asks where the other two people are and I explain the dilemma. No problem he says and makes a few phone calls and tells me it will be 1 ½ hours before my son and DIL will be back. Then he does the most amazing thing, he asks if I would like to tour his little town? Here we go again, what do I do, ride off in the sunset with a little French man? What if my son makes it back early, doesn’t think I’m there and heads back to Paris without me. What if this whole thing is unsafe, I don’t know this man. What should I do? Well, I threw caution to the wind, climbed in the volkswawagon and had a private tour of the little town, the best 1 ½ hours of my entire trip. He dropped me off at the cathedral in Bayeux, the sister to Notre Dame in Paris and I was able to explore the entire cathedral alone. I couldn’t believe it was unlocked and he just left me there because there wasn’t any place for him to park. To see the inside of that cathedral and admire it’s breathtaking beauty alone. To be in the presence of such history, the drink in the glory of God’s work! How sacred! Something I know I will never experience again this side of heaven. Something I could never had done had I been with a group of people!
To finish the story, the tour guide picked me back up and we made it back to the train station to pick up my son and DIL and had plenty of time to tour the beaches at Normandy. What a memory. Thanks for hanging with me, I know this has been a long one. I hope it was worth it.