Friends on Flights

When you are alone in a city and you don't know many people, it gets really difficult to make friends. When you are in college you have people your age all the time and it's much easier to make friends. After I moved to a new city for my job I often found myself lonely. I didn't know how I could find people to hang out with. I figured out that you can make friends anywhere - In a movie theater, at the mall.. and especially on a flight:) Over the few months I have met very interesting people on the flight of all ages. I have met a police officer who gave me his number to call him back (pssh..but I never did 'coz he was a little too old for me and was divorced), an insurance agent (a young and light hearted man who I remember was very polite), a tired woman named Annette who slept most of the time because she had been traveling all day, a southerner ( I don't know what he did for a living because he fell asleep before I could ask!), a nurse , a psychologist (a very kind woman who talked about her children and grandchildren) and a sales clerk (..she was my age and talked a lot about her boyfriend and relationships in general).
Of all the people that I remember, the one who struck me the most was Cindy. Cindy is a nurse in her late 50's and lives in Kansas. I met her on the flight to Colorado about 3-4 weeks back. She was going to visit her daughter who was expecting her first baby. We had an interesting conversation about almost everything on an hour long flight. We discussed religion, social work, dating and different cultures among many things. Cindy mentioned one thing that really impressed me a lot. She said that she doesn't see "color". We were talking about racism and she mentioned that it didn't matter to her which race someone belonged to. We were discussing how all those surveys in which you have to reveal your ethnicity should be banned because it makes no sense. She had traveled extensively after her marriage and knew a lot about different cultures. She also told me a very interesting story about how she accepted people who were atheists and stopped judging them. She said that earlier she thought that people who don't believe in God go to hell. She wasn't exposed to different cultures or religion while she was growing up and her perspective was very limited. But one day she came across a boy who was an atheist and said something to her that really struck her and changed her whole perspective towards atheists. I wish I could remember what he had said - I can't seem to remember at the moment. At the end of the flight we had so much to talk about that we exchanged email addresses. We keep writing back and forth and it's really nice to see how she is doing.