Gate A-4

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque
Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I
heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4
understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was
my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional
Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the
floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is
her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and
she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman
and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani
schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words
she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the
flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for
major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get
there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him
in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane
and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her
other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad
and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had
ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call
some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up
two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of
her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack
of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly
mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them
to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman
declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina,
the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all
covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better
cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple
juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving
it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too.
And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a
potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry
leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay
rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and
weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared
world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion
stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies.