"Thanksgiving to you."

This was the teary-eyed farewell. She then focused on walking, with the assistance of a shopping cart. I hesitated and considering helping her, but I knew she was one who was proud of her independence, at the age of 82.

How did this begin? Well, it began with a visit to the grocery store. I was told that the best one was inside the mall. When I entered, I remembered it was Thanksgiving Day back home, and I reminisced of my favorite holiday back home - the turkey, the cranberry sauce, and my mother's incomparable wax beans. I wandered over to the turkey section, stared at them with a mouthwatering covetousness, before recognizing that my ambition level was not high enough for learning how to cook a turkey by myself today. Besides, the holiday is best with a family around you, and I feared the taste of turkey would only make me wish for company.

But I did know I was thirsty. For about 5 minutes I made a circuit, placing several liters worth of liquids into my card before I realized that one should never shop when they're thirsty. I put the handcart down somewhere and bought some water and a single 1-liter mango drink. I intended to sit down outside the store and just reflect on the day.

Which, fortunately, didn't happen. I sat on a bench with no one else, but there was another bench on the other side of a garbage can where an aboriginal lady sat, leaning against a shopping cart. I smiled and said hi, to which she reciprocated. After a few minutes, she handed me a newspaper, to which she energetically pointed to a front-page article about the activities of the planet of Mars. She said something along the lines of "it's the end of an era." You could imagine I was a bit confused, but I felt patient and asked her a bit more.

Thus began our hour-long conversation in the mall, me with a brightly colored Argentine futbol jersey, her with a thrift-store flowery blue dress. For a while, we spoke around the garbage can, but after a few minutes she came to sit next to me on the bench. After finding out that I was from New York State, she broke into a gasp of the likes that I couldn't do even if I'd seen Margaret Thatcher naked.

She was shocked, and began saying things that I couldn't quite understand. I eventually gathered that she had dreamt of what would happen in the terrorist attacks of September 11. I enquired further and she began speaking of an Indian man from New York that she'd met, who saw her reading a book on Yoga and sat down to talk to her. She was concerned that this man, who worked in New York for the UN, might have been in the twin towers when they collapsed. I mentioned that he probably worked in another building, but in any case, I asked if she remembered his name, to which she squinted off in the distance, trying to remember.

Then I remembered that I knew an Indian man who worked for the UN. This was a man who gave a speech at college that I remember admiring. I asked, "Was his name Sashi, Sashi Tharoor?" At this I received the wide-eyed gasp again. For seconds that seemed minutes, she sat there looking at me, before slapping my leg and saying "Yes! I think it was Sashi." I told her then that he was very famous, and that if anything had happened to him then I would have learned of it. So he must have been okay. I later found out that the man she met didn't work for the UN at all, but she was so visibly happy that he was alive that I didn't feel like retracting her new spirits.

Strange as the conversation was, it's difficult to convey exactly why our talk was significant. Even as we were discussing the Indian man from New York, it was as though we were having a parallel conversation through eyes and facial reactions. Her constant shift of expressions seemed to jump quickly whenever I least expected. She would rapidly mumble through statements that I presumed were important, and then, with a freezing gaze, slowly articulate in a perfect Australian accent something seemingly extraneous. Then she would wink at strange moments, like those when I was considering what I would say next, as if she was winking the phrase, "I already know what you're about to say."

We would then progress to talk about my family and what they were probably doing on the holidiay on the other side of the world. She told me of how she'd seen Nat King Cole and used to help the American paratroopers during WWII. She told me that she had an uncle who was a kahuna from the island of Niue, that her grandfather was Jamaican, but that her mother was aboriginal. She also mentioned Afghan blood, and when she wrote me her name she remarked with pride that it was Scottish. Throughout all of this I couldn't tell what could be fact or what could be fiction, but I attentively watched her winking, shockingly blue eyes.

A few minutes into this, I recognized that the words of our speech weren't the most important part. It was the wordless shifts of our faces that she valued most. I tried to accomodate by moving my normally-stoic facial muscles, but I must have looked quite comical. At the end of it, I recognized that she was a very spiritual and passionate person, and someone that I probably never could quite figure out. She wrote me her address and I said I would mail her a postcard.

When she had left, I laughed when I noticed that her first words to me - "it's the end of an era" - were written across the top of the newspaper she had given me, except these titlehead words were related to the other half of the front page - something about the retirement of Steve Waugh, a famous Aussie cricket-player. But I was sure that she had difinitively pointed to the article about Mars. I smiled at how her priorities were reflected in this switch, and I wondered at how well she fit, with her spirituality and winking conversation, into a society obsessed with the transient things like sport, instead of the slow motions of planets and stars... and longstanding human cultures for that matter.

Again, I'm sorry if this does not come across as profound, but I have had many unrecorded conversations like these that compose the real backbone of the value of travel for me. They are priceless. As are the words, "Thanksgiving to you." when you aren't powerful enough to dig a hole straight through the earth to be with your family when you'd like to be.