I’m writing from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I’m here for Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing.

Last night, my flight got cancelled, and I was stuck in Chicago O’Hare International Airport for four hours. Luckily, I wasn’t alone.

Pictured on stage from left to right: Christine Byl, Eli Cranor, A. Muia, and Andrew Hicks at the Festival of Faith and Writing. Image courtesy of Emelyn DeWeerd

Which leads me back to O’Hare.

Johnny and I made our way to the nearest bar, which happened to be inside a Macaroni Grill, and ordered up a couple beverages. After a few minutes of staring blankly at a television mounted to the wall, we turned our stools around and decided to bear witness to the mass of humanity flowing toward destinations unknown.

A waitress stopped us and said, “I’ve never seen nobody turn their chairs around like that before.”

I thought I recognized her from a previous trip. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me the waitress had once had bigger hair.

When she was gone, Johnny started talking about Arthur Schopenhauer. I don’t remember what led him to the pessimistic German philosopher. I just remember Johnny explaining how Schopenhauer had this theory that if you tallied up all the good and the bad in the world, the bad would win out every time.

“And it’s that line of thinking,” Johnny concluded, “that led Schopenhauer to claim that it was better to have never been born at all.”

I took a sip from my beer and watched more people stream by, so many folks I’d never know, epicenters of their own small universes.

“You believe that?” I said, finally.

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Johnny hemmed and hawed. In the end, he wasn’t sure.

“How about this,” I said. “How about this weekend, we prove old Schopenhauer wrong.”

Johnny said, “Deal, Pickle,” and we finished our beers.

When we eventually made it to Grand Rapids at a little past midnight, the Sonheims were there to pick us up. The next morning, I headed to Handlon Correctional Facility, where I discussed my latest novel with fifty or so inmates and then played them my own rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues.”

Johnny (Wink, not Cash) was waiting for me at the college when I returned. We enjoyed a “happy hour” with the Sonheims. We listened to the poet Ross Gay read some beautiful garden-themed poems, my favorite of which was the one about potatoes.

The next day, I had two more panels, and then we headed back to the Sonheims' house for supper. It was here that the scales tipped.

Surrounded by new friends and old friends, watching Johnny chop it up with a Calvin professor who pens surrealist poetry based on Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, I knew Schopenhauer had it wrong.

There is more good in the world than bad. If that weren’t true, humanity would cease to be. We couldn’t get from the house to the grocery store, from the gas station to the airport. If people weren’t “good” a majority of the time, civilization would crumble.

And even if it did, I bet Johnny and I could still find a way to make the best of it.

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