You Have No Idea
Firewood, Grease Stains, 45s and Moby Dick
It was an innocent question. Those can create strong reactions. This was no different.
“Do you burn that?” the cashier at the market asked politely.
I smiled under my mask and said, “Yes, just like a campfire, but in a fireplace.”
The neighboring cashier, after a belly laugh, blurted out, “what do you think you do, eat it!” More chuckles ensued.
My cashier shrunk a little the way you do when you are embarrassed. I felt bad. I tried to actively ignore the snide commenter and said something about the value of curiosity. Then we wished each other a good evening.
But the mind can’t let go. This person sells firewood, but, maybe, hasn’t seen a fire in a fireplace in person. That’s not entirely without explanation. There aren’t many in NYC and you haven’t been allowed to build new ones since about 2014.
But the other explanation is about how we live. In different realities for all manner of reasons. I was reminded of a class I took in college. In it we studied underhanded rules and realities throughout the course of history. One project looked at standardized testing. Consider the question;
Where does the cup go?
A. The Table
B. The Counter
C. The Chair
D. The Saucer.
That may not be verbatim, but depending on a number of factors, socioeconomic ones among them, you know a different answer. The dilemma with that? There was only one right answer. Raise your pinky if you know.
Being reminded your knowledge or perspectives are yours and yours alone builds wisdom. But it’s not easy to do. One thing I like about myself is that I like to travel, for work, for fun. I’ve been to 45 states, maybe 46. I’ve visited most multiple times and many for fairly long stretches. As a journalist you ask and see things many don’t themselves. It’s a privilege. You get a sense of places and people. Get to walk a few steps in their lives.
I often used an old trick. I would make it clear that I needed to ask what might seem like “dumb questions.” I’d explain I didn’t want to make an assumption and mistake, so please pardon me. I liked to start at zero, the beginning. This desire to be naive and grant people a clean slate, a right to a first impression, has evolved in me. But I can remember a day early in my career that it first struck me.
In the mid 1990s I was returning a car to the airport in Kentucky after working in Ohio. Did you know that the airport for Cincinnati, Ohio, is actually in the state of Kentucky?
I needed to stop for gas. I pulled into a rural gas station. This was before a few things, pay at the pump, digital displays, and that god forsaken gas station TV. It varied, but at this spot you went inside and handed the attendant cash or your credit card. That “down payment” secured you returned to the pump and filled your tank.
I had time to think. The man behind the counter was gigantic. Well over six feet tall. Built, but not in the modern preworkout way. A long beard. White singlet undershirt and blue jeans. Grease stained all. I noticed his hands as I handed my credit card over. His fingers were gigantic and hard. Callused and scarred. Each digit like a link in a large chain.
This may seem a weird thing to notice but I had done a few stories in prisons and jails before this. More than a few inmates and guards talked about using the state of someone’s hands to judge them, particularly as a matter of gauging how dangerous they might be. Prison hands. Since then I find myself doing it, from time to time. Makes for a fun game, imagining a whole back story based on the hands alone.
He was cast for this spot on a country road in the woods of Northern Kentucky.
After filling my tank I returned to complete the purchase. My man was hunched over the counter looking at something. But when I entered he stood and turned to get my credit card slip. Resting in the small of his back was a 1911 handgun. The classic .45. I smiled, it looked tiny. He grabbed my slip and turned as I arrived at the counter. Looking down to sign I stopped when I noticed what he had been looking at, well reading. It was a worn and heavily annotated copy of Moby Dick.
I couldn’t help myself, “Moby Dick” I said.
“Yes”, he replied with a smile. “It’s for school”, he continued.
I asked what he was studying and without missing a beat he said, “I’m working on my PhD in philosophy.”
In that instant I thought, “I have no idea.” I cherish moments like this. Where all my presumptions, baked in me over five decades of life, are laughed at. Mark Twain put it this way, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one's lifetime.”
Get out, ask the silly questions, let your narrow view be widened. Seek to have a charitable view of others. Savour the moments when you do and the pleasure that growth provides.