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Morgan and Julia, former Los Angelenos (Angel...eries? No...too French. Angel...investors? I don't think you get those that far south. Angelicans? Sure, why not.) who left the West Coast for New England three years ago and found themselves sucked into the orbit of Atlanta. They seem surprised to realize how long their brief stopover in Georgia has lasted. As a product of Houston, the Great Black Hole of the Gulf, I've seen that "How did this happen?" expression more than a few times. They're fresh from a brewery run by the game company Paizo, and, as part of the great nerd-dialogue, I tell them about the book I'm reading and they point me to a platform for playing RPGs with distant friends.
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Evelyn, a Spanish woman living in Vienna and fresh from an adventure up and down the West Coast. She's reading Le Carte et Le Territoire, a Spanish translation (which I can't read) of the French (which I could probably stumble through), and we share just enough of the common language for me to pick up on the fact that it's a Baudrillard-esque reflection on the nature of simulacrum vs reality. As I write this I'm reading up on book and author (is there a better portrait to be found of a crazed French intellectual?) and I suspect she made the better choice compared with my AngularJS reading. Neither of us know our way around the Amsterdam airport and our paths crisscross multiple times as we try to find the right queue.
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Delhi (almost certainly a misnomer on my part), a cheerful older woman of Indian descent returning to Kansas City from Uganda. You may find the components of that itinerary as unexpected as I did. Delhi was born in India before her family moved to Uganda when she was an infant. They were kicked out by the infamous tyrant Idi Amin when she was in her 20s and moved to London for a decade before moving to Kansas City and opening a motel. Her generation scraped to put together a stake for their kids who have gone on to become fantastically wealthy and successful in business and insist on making sure their parents can relax in their twilight years. She tells me they were upset when they were forced out of Uganda, but now she returns to Uganda and sees a country unchanged--the same buildings, roads, and cars--save for the layers of dirt and decay bequeathed by entropy and sees it was all for the best. Give it twenty years and her life story will be a New York Times bestseller and award-winning biopic.
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An Empty Seat, not a great conversationalist (though I can only imagine the many storied butts that have sat in it), but I'll always remember how it kindly shared itself and didn't mind if I took up a little extra elbow room.