I was waiting for my sister to get through the ridiculously long line for immigration at the Bahamas, and I decided to sit next to an older man, maybe in his sixties. He had his hands on a walking stick and was dressed casually with wispy white/blond/sun-bleached hair. He asks me where I’m from. I say, New York. He knew it – but in a good way. He says he likes New Yorkers and finds them to be rather friendly, but really dislikes southern California. I immediately like his taste ;) He’s waiting for an Air Canada flight and has been asking everyone where they were coming in from. I thought he was a fairly normal Canadian man, but the next hour proved me wrong.
This man lives in the Bahamas, but is originally Canadian. Lived in London and the far east for many years. He has a home in the Bahamas and said he flies his private jet since he can’t stand the immigration lines of this airport. I agree!! This airport sucks! He built a home in Tennessee and goes on to tell me how he hated flying through Miami because there are no direct flights into Nassau. Nice. He gets up for a second to take a walk and ask other people where they are flying in from. The Air Canada flight arrived over 2 hours ago, and no Canadians were coming out. His daughter and 4 year-old grandson are coming in from Toronto. He thinks about how hard it must be to travel with a 4-year old and wait for over an hour or two in the immigration line.
I notice that he is wearing an earring on his right ear. It’s a 1” hoop with half carat-ish diamonds all around it. His walking stick is not ordinary either. The top is intricately designed and there is a giant gem on top. Hmmm.
He sits back down next to me. We continue to chat. First of all, he thinks I’m a student. I say that I’m out of school. He says, “By school, I mean university, not high school.” Haha, I tell him it’s been nearly 10 years since I graduated college. He is curious what I do. He asks how the economy is doing. He reads the news but likes to ask people to take a pulse on how the economy is doing. He tells me of friends who were fairly wealthy who lost everything because of Lehman, etc…. He then asks me if I travel a lot. I tell him most of my travel is domestic and not very sexy at all. But one of the perks is that I have miles and points that I get to spend on vacations like this!
I get ultimately jealous when he tells me he got a letter letting him know that has 31 million points on his American Express Black card. His points aren’t from traveling, they are from pure spending. He can’t deal with blackout dates and therefore never uses them and just buys the ticket. He should have maybe used his points to pay for his daughter and grandson’s trip to see him but couldn’t be bothered to figure it out.I tell him…. If you have enough points and are willing to part with more than just the minimum required, points can buy you many things – even tickets to special events. Maybe he will call his American Express Black concierge some time, tell them what he wants and see what he can do with his points, he says.
We enter the thirty minute mark of our conversation, and he tells me that he is in the mining business. He has a mine in Canada and Africa – mostly diamonds. And he does a lot of business in East Asia. His wife is Chinese. He loves East Asia. That takes our conversation into another direction. He just doesn’t understand racism. His daughter married a Brazilian and his grandson’s complexion is “café au lait” and the world’s skin coloring is turning more and more blended into this beautiful color as we mix.
He sees a boy through the automatic sliding doors with a red shirt and “café au lait” coloring. He gets up, saying… that might be him. It’s the right coloring. But the boy looks like he could be 10 years old, I say. He laughs and says that I’m probably right – he doesn’t know how big a 4 year old should be.
Meanwhile, I see the burnt orange color of my sister’s jacket… not that I’ve ever seen it, but she told me that she bought an orange jacket at JCrew recently, and I wasn’t surprised she was wearing it. So the man and I said our good-byes. He wishes me a great stay, and I hope he enjoys the week with the fam.
I was just so incredibly impressed by this guy. He was approachable, friendly, and lived an interesting life. I didn’t care that he was probably some billionaire with a private car waiting for him to take him to one of those crazy mansions on the island. More than anything, he was just a dad and a granddad eagerly awaiting his guests just like me at the airport.
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