Monday, June 20, 2005

Are you Joel?

This weekend our good friend from Virginia, John, came to town for a wedding and stayed with us. Janice, also a good friend from our Virginia days, moved here last week and dropped by to visit too. The four of us had a great time reliving old memories and catching up with each other. It was so great to see both of them again. We’re excited that Janice lives here now and look forward to seeing her frequently.

My boss, who is in charge of a camp for high schoolers this week, called me over the weekend and asked me if we could pick up a guy named Joel from the airport Sunday night. Joel is going to be a staffer at the camp this week. John and Janice, being good sports, decided to hop in the car with us and go get Joel from the airport. We had no clue what Joel looked like and no idea what airline he was coming in on. All we knew is that he’s a college student from BIOLA and was flying in at 6:58 p.m. We were going to get a piece of paper or cardboard and write Joel’s name on it but, at the last minute, we couldn’t find a Sharpe pen. So, we piled in the car and headed for the airport empty-handed and with scant information.

“This is going to be fun,” said Janice. I loved her optimism.

Fortunately, it only took John, Janice and I about thirty minutes to find Joel (while Kevin circled the airport in the car). The process was quite hysterical, though. Basically, John and I stood from afar and watched as Janice (who, apparently, has no shy bone in her body) waltzed up to every guy who looked between the age of 16 and 30 and asked him, “Are you Joel?” After accosting about a dozen guys and having him paged over the intercom twice, we still couldn’t find Joel. That’s when John did some sleuthing and figured out that Joel must be flying in on United – which was in an entirely different terminal. (We had wrongly presumed that, since it was an in-state flight, Joel would be on Southwest.)

It was a team effort. And I’m happy to report that our operation was successful. Thanks to Janice and John!


Old Friends

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now, there's a good picture of four (five) great kids! ~Sherri

Sarah M. said...

Sniff, sniff... I was only a couple hours away from you guys in Fresno.

CABeachBlonde said...

...and I was somewhere in the middle. ;) There must be some sort of Virginia-California link goin' on ... (and, that's such a great story!)

Megan said...

Oh man ... what a precious picture of the good ol' days!!