CHAPTER 12

Three Minutes at a Time

Friendships can last a lifetime, but we make them three

minutes at a time.

Hello, Patricia? Hi! What can I do for you?”

“Adrian’s gone.”
“Gone? Where did he go? Let’s go find him.”
“No, Adrian died today.”
When I heard those words, I was stopped by a wave of confusion.
How could this be? You see, Adrian had become a close friend of mine.
He was particularly special to me because we built our years-long
friendship just three minutes at a time. Let me tell you how.
Adrian worked at the airport in San Diego. He stood at the front of a
long line of often anxious and frustrated people, waiting to get through
security. Some were on their way to a vacation, and some were on
business trips. Some were happy, and some were sad. It seemed weirdly
incongruous; they were all heading somewhere, yet they were all going
nowhere at the moment. The security lines were always too long, and I
could feel the tension of a hundred snagged travelers all trying to squeeze
through the security bottleneck.
Most mornings the line stretched like a giant snake out the doors of
the airport. None of it was Adrian’s fault, of course. Not the lateness, not
the bottleneck, not all the security rules. But Adrian bore the brunt of a
thousand angry stares, crumpled faces, and sharp comments every day. It
wasn’t because he deserved it; it was just because he was the guy at the
front of the line. You see, Adrian worked for the TSA and wore a uniform