Nikos Liapis

I was thinking about planes, or rather I was thinking about all the great things that I have experienced thanks to planes. The places discovered, the people met, the bonds forged, the photographs taken, the memories made, the immense joy of wrapping your arms around loved ones at the other end of the sliding customs exit doors at arrivals.

I was thinking about Daniel, the Ethiopian cab driver who picked me up from the airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan one late Monday night after an exhausting 24-hour journey from Athens. He was cheerful and enquired politely where I had flown in from. He got particularly excited about the fact that I had come all the way from Greece. “I have an uncle living in Athens” he said. In my sleep deprived state (it was 7am in Greek time after all and I’d been up since 7am the previous time), I cynically thought here we go: another of those “you come from x-million inhabitant city – I have a cousin/friend/uncle (delete as appropriate) living there – do you know them?”. Well, actually sometimes these questions do work but I’ll have to leave that story for another time!

Daniel instead told me about his father who had lost touch with his brother in Greece, possibly Athens, for more than 10 years. How he had desperately tried to relocate him and how it had been an impossible task due to the lack of an address, of friends or family in Athens, and of spare money for the brother to return to the homeland. I suspected more reasons for the rift between the two brothers but it was still a sad story and it intrigued me. In a bizarre moment of semi-alertness, I asked Daniel if he had that phone number with him so that I could have a look to see if it was an Athenian number and if it was wrong. His face lit up and passed me his mobile phone with the number as he was driving. It did indeed look like an Athens phone but seemed to be missing three digits: 210, the Athens area code. Although this was no guarantee that he had a way of connecting his father with his long-lost brother, Daniel was visibly thrilled and it felt good to help a complete stranger. He thanked me profusely and I asked for one thing in return: that he let me know if the number actually worked. The next morning, I got this message…