Everybody Loves Saturday Night

I can see!

I ran out of contacts several months ago, and only got around to making an eye doctor appointment last week. It had been two years since my last exam, and I figured that was enough time for my eyes to have totally deteriorated. I could see fine, but they were getting really tired more quickly than usual.

Guess what. My eyesight has improved. Significantly. The glasses I had been wearing were prescribed for someone whose right eye was -2.75 and whose left eye was -3.50. My new prescription? Right eye at -1.75 and left eye at -2.75. No, I don't really know what that means either, other than it's a really huge jump from before. I asked my doctor whether myopia often improves spontaneously like that, or whether this was just a big misdiagnosis by my eye doctor in Oxford. It could've been either, but I like the idea that my eyes improved that much, and that my doctor in Ohio wasn't a total idiot. Perhaps I am an evolutionary wonder. Hey, guess what, mom? Rubbing my eyes and reading with dim light didn't hurt my eyes at all!

But no wonder my eyes were getting so tired! They were straining so hard to work under an overly strong prescription. When I tried my new contacts on, I noted that I could feel my eye muscles working to bring things into focus. It felt very strange. My doctor (you know, he's pretty cute, in that way guys in their 40s who love their kids are cute. But not as cute as the vet Scout had in Oxford. Dr. Reagh, pronounced "Ray." Oh my, he was cute. All the ladies took their pets to Dr. Reagh) told me that was a good sign, because it meant my eye muscles that had been working overtime were now relaxing. Well, OK, he said "spasming," which I think was, um, an unfortunate choice of word, because I have the mind of a 12-year-old boy. And you know I spent the rest of the day thinking, "my eye muscles are spasming" and snickering.

I picked out some new frames, too, but they haven't come in yet. I'll take a picture when I get them. For now, though, I'm totally loving having my peripheral vision back. My improved peripheral vision.

I've had glasses since...seventh grade? And the thing is, I wanted them. There was something about being in junior high and wanting to be taken seriously that made me want them. I also think my desire for glasses stemmed from reading far too many YA books about girls with glasses who were both smart and pretty and wanting to be like that. If I'm being honest, I should also point out that these books, and their counterpart movies, would feature a nervous and insecure brainy girl pushing her glasses back up on her nose, which I always thought very attractive for some reason, and would inevitably have a scene in which the brainy girl would take her glasses off (or, even better, have her glasses removed by The Cute Boy, right before he moves in for The Big Kiss) and reveal herself to be just absolutely gorgeous in a very real and accessible way. Really, I never got that whole "glasses make you ugly" idea, I've always found something very sexy about them, on both men and women. I never really bought into that whole "Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" business either, although my complete lack of fashion backbone meant that my glasses were hideous. You know, though, boys don't really care what's on your face as long as you've got big boobs (yeah, I did just write that). But still, despite the fact that I was entertaining some very foolish ideas about high school gender roles and romance, I do think I was hip to the whole geek chic wave that happened...15 years later.

Bang, bang. Shoot, shoot.

Let me tell you a little something about the Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn. All the middle people--from the women who give you the same damn medical history form to fill out every time you visit and won't answer your questions, to the question ladies who ask you the same damn questions that are on the damn form but then don't seem to care about the answers, to the lab people who think they're efficient but aren't--have long ago stopped caring about honing their customer service skills and as a result no longer realize that the people they're dealing with are real.

The practitioners, on the other hand, are awesome. So the annual exam visit is basically a test of will, to see if you can withstand the arduous and demoralizing wait before you're blessed with access to the inner sanctum of paper robes and breast exam cheat sheets, and very nice people who do answer all your questions and laugh at your jokes.

All that aside, you know what I would like? I've been going to gynecologists for seventeen years now, and I've been to several different doctors in my time, and I would like, just once, for my gynecologist to tell me I have a lovely vagina. She doesn't have to tell me it's the most beautiful she's ever seen; I don't necessarily need to hear, "You know, I've seen a lot of vaginas in my day, and yours is by far the very best" (and now I'm wondering whether I'd like the plural of vagina to be vagina, ala Brainylady's "grams of bra"), but you know? I mean, I think it's nice. I'm not looking for outside validation or anything. I just think it would make me feel very special indeed to know that my doctor thinks my vagina is pretty.

Last year I had to wait about three and a half hours before I got to see the practitioner. I think I managed to knit a whole sock leg in that time. This time I brought a ball of Mango Moon recycled silk to play with, and after only (!) a little over an hour, I had this:



That's 23 inches of simple drop-stitch over 12 stitches on size 11s. The picture makes it seem not much to look at, but it's prettier in person (ahem).

Since I'm showing pictures (something was up with my camera battery yesterday, so Knitting Monday has been extended for one day only), here's what I've got on the sideways sweater:



The color is almost true. Close. It's a very shimmery yarn, and very easy to knit loosely. Sometimes too loosely. The sleeve is all garter stitch and starts with a ruffled edge done on larger needles. I'm on my fifth ball of yarn already, out of ten, and now I'm worrying that I'll have enough.

Here's wishing all you ladies out there the very warmest of specula.

I can't believe I just typed that title. Anyone get it, at least? Summer camp? The announcements song?

1. Colleen comes back today. Oh my god, THANK GOD. I have to see to it that she never leaves for more than one week ever, ever again (I will sit on her if I have to). Col: welcome back, babe. Angel's Share, soon, please.

2. I'm shutting this blog down at the end of this week. I mentioned moving to Typepad last week and I'm already working on that site, and it will be mostly operational soon. Last week my decision to do this was personal, but now Blogger has pissed me off with a non-response to a technical question. I guess you really do get what you pay for. Guess what, Blogger peeps? You upgraded me for FREE last year and never billed me for a cent. Suckers. P.S. I hate the new layout.

3. Go see Garden State. Zach Braff has a blog. Not that that's the reason you should see it, just because he's got a blog. No--the movie is quite good. There are moments it's a little precious, and yes, the comparisons critics are making to The Graduate and Harold and Maude are fairly apt, but you know...I don't get why so many people are harping on how this movie is exactly like The Graduate. It's not. I didn't think so, anyway, apart from both of them being about disassociated main characters, and oooh, Garden State uses one Simon and Garfunkel song, so it's totally trying to be The Graduate. Whatever.

You Graduate fans might hate me, but I never liked Ben as a character. I think he's insufferable, and totally unsympathetic. Love the movie, hate that guy. And Andrew (Braff's character) is completely sympathetic: his mom just died, his psychiatrist father has him on every kind of anti-depressant...I get why the two characters are supposed to be similar, but honestly...maybe it's a generational thing.

Natalie Portman is awesome, even though she's cursed with looking far younger than she really is, so that each time she and Braff get closer, I wanted to yell, "Dude, she's, like, twelve!"

The restaurant that Andrew works at in L.A. at the beginning of the movie is actually SEA, which is right here in Williamsburg and one of my favorite places to eat--great Thai food at really nice prices. And they make an awesome lychee martini. And it's just a disgustingly huge and luxurious space. Funny thing, every time I've been there I get seated somewhere in the back, but the last time, exactly a week before I went to see this movie, I actually got to sit next to the Buddha pool. It was lovely.

I didn't like the way it ended. That's my only real complaint about the movie. If you've been reading me for a while, you know that I am rarely satisfied with movie endings. Sometimes the ending will make me hate the entire movie. This one didn't, because I know why it ended the way it did, but it did feel forced and tacked on.

4. It's Knitting Monday today, but my camera battery is charging, so pictures will be by later.

I'm rather restless in projects these days. I've stalled on the orange cardigan. I still haven't finished the first sleeve. I just...it's too boring.

I went back to the Mermaid sock I started over a month ago--I've been picking at it every now and then. I've decided that afterthought heels are not for me. I don't like feeling like I'm knitting one big tube; it's endless and boring. I finally reached the toe decreases over the weekend but even that is taking forEVER. Breaking off for the heel is necessary for me; it gives me a feeling of satisfying progress. And it breaks the monotony of the tube.

I sorta stalled on the Giotto shawl, too.

And I started a new thing--the sideways ribbon pullover from the Spring 04 IK. The pattern calls for Berroco Zen; I'm using Schachenmayr Goa scored from Elann. It's the first time I've worked with a pattern like this, and I like it. Almost at the point where I divide into front and back.

I have to start another new thing soon--a sweater commissioned by my mom. It needs to be done by the end of September. I'll swatch today or tomorrow.

I would have been here sooner, but I dropped a glass jar on the tile floor in the kitchen. You know, my dad used to have carpet in his kitchen, which always struck me as a really dumb idea, but now I'm thinking the carpet might have prevented imperceptible jagged shards of glass from bouncing into places I won't find for weeks. Not until I gain confidence in my shard removal technique, and forget the incident ever happened, and get comfortable enough once more to walk around barefoot.

It was an old salsa jar I was using to store wet cat food after I open a new can of it (because you're not supposed to keep things in aluminum. I don't know why that is, because it's fine to wrap things in foil. But something about cans is bad), and it was still nearly full of cat food. Fortunately, Scout had just been fed and only looked up inquisitively (as cats will do) from his little bowl, and didn't feel the need to take advantage of my clumsiness. "She's so cute when she goofs up like that," he probably thought. What? You know he thought that.

Oh, I am so clumsy. I drop things all the time. I'm the Dropper in my family. Once it was a bottle of ketchup I was carrying from the kitchen to the dining room table, which stood on a very pleasant light yellow carpet. If I remember correctly, this was just after plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup had hit the market, so there was at least that saving grace. Still--it was plastic. Isn't plastic not supposed to break open like that? My stepsister laughed at me. Maybe the actual drop looked funny to her or something, because otherwise I don't know what she found so funny about it, particularly since dinner was going to be delayed until all the ketchup was cleaned up--and have you ever seen what happens to ketchup in a bottle once you drop the bottle? Imagine you're watching some sci fi horror B-movie, and the ketchup bottle is a person about to get hit with alien laser rays that cause every molecule in his body to expand, until his body structure can't take it anymore and he explodes, sending organs and blood in every direction for miles and miles and miles. Um, OK. That is pretty funny, actually. I guess I'll have to forgive my stepsister for laughing at me. (And to be honest, the fact that she still remembers this incident as well, and brings it up, like, every time I see her--"Remember when you dropped the ketchup bottle?"--is pretty cool, because I tend to remember funny things and inside jokes like that as well.)

I have also dropped entire plates of food before. I think this has only happened in the privacy of my home, when I've been trying to balance the plate and a glass of water while grabbing a fork from the silverware drawer. Oh, but how irritating, especially the time this happened just after I had finished making a particularly delicious stir-fry with a number of yummy vegetables and had topped it off with the last of the peanut sauce (which has replaced ketchup as my condiment of choice, though I've never dropped a bottle of peanut sauce, and considering that no grocery stores in my area carry peanut sauce, it's not looking likely that I will have the chance to do so in the near future), only to have it all come tumbling down in a big mess, hitting my yoga mat, and destoying one of the wonderful pasta bowls that my mom bought me as a housewarming gift.

I drop my keys on a regular basis, when I go to unlock the door. I drop expensive electronic equipment, but fortunately no harm has ever come to them (knock wood). I have dropped the ball many a time (figuratively and literally). I have of course dropped stitches. I'm pretty sure I've never dropped a baby, but you know, it's only a matter of time (this might be what's working against my maternal instincts--a stronger instinct that tells me disaster and jail lie that way). But you know? Someone needs to explain to me what causes me to drop things. Not me. In general. What synapses fire or misfire that cause one's fingers and hands to suddenly decide not to hold whatever it is that they're holding? What makes them think, "Eh, this is tiresome" and then let go?

I had been barefoot in the kitchen when I dropped the salsa jar full of cat food, so I had to go put on shoes before I cleaned up. It's one thing to have to pick up all the jagged shards of broken glass, but it's quite another when those shards are embedded or otherwise involved in cold, moist, slightly slimy cat food. At least the stuff I feed Scout smells more like real food (because that's what it's made of. Innova. Love that stuff. Scout eats healthier than I do). I got the big pieces up, swept all over the kitchen, salvaged what I could of the cat food and put it into a new glass jar (Smucker's grape jelly) that seemed nervous, but bravely stepped up for duty. Then I started the coffee and went to the computer. And that's when I noticed a rather sizeable quantity of blood coming from the top of my big toe on my left foot.

I've said before I have a really, really low threshold for pain. Banging my elbow against a door handle (I seem to do this with great frequency) is often enough to make me need to sit down until the dizziness passes. So it really surprises me when my body doesn't realize it's been wounded. Once I slashed open my finger while cutting a bagel, and it never really registered. I saw myself do it, and just said, "Well, I need a band-aid." My roommate was convinced I needed stitches or something, because she's even more insane about those things than I am. So here I am, looking curiously at my foot, trying to detect if there's a piece of glass in there, because that would mean I'd need to remove it, and that's just not something I think I could do. On someone else's big toe, sure. No problem. Because it's someone else's toe. My second thought was to admire the vivid color of my blood. It reminded me of the Kyoto folks on the West Coast have been snatching up like there's no tomorrow.

There was, fortunately, no piece of glass in my foot. Though of course now I'm sitting here trying to ward off the neurotic obsession with the idea that there are tiny glass particles that are cruising through my bloodstream and now I have minutes left to live. But, you know, this whole thing went down about an hour ago, so I think I'm OK.

Update

My mom just sent me this email:

You forgot to mention the time you dropped the potato salad on the sidewalk.

I love you anyway.

Mom

Yesterday's post was a bit of a fluke, since most of it had been written a few years ago. I don't expect most of these to be that long, since now I'm back to pretty much writing off the cuff, which means now the pressure's on to come up with some shit like, every day. Or not. I don't have to do this every day. I don't know why I think I do. It's not like I've ever followed some kind of daily routine...but now I'm flirting with the idea of going all anal and organized and compartmentalizing this here blog so that every day would be something a little different. Like, Wednesdays would be about knitting. Thursdays would be Grammar Days (I haven't forgotten about doing that, like with the semi-colon. I just...haven't done it). Fridays would be Ask Auntie Em Days, where I answer questions that have been emailed to me during the week...yeah, right. Like people would actually do that (what if Judy--Ms. ELSN up there--answered them?). Anyway, the point of all this is that in order to implement those changes, I need a new bloggin' service, and so I'm actually, no really, honest, I'm serious this time, heading over to Typepad. By the end of this month, it will have happened. You heard it here first. You're not going to hear it here again. I have my reasons. And now, on to our feature presentation.

My favorite part of teaching--being in the classroom--is also the most exhausting. It's impossible for me, even on days I've been woefully ill or hungover, to walk into a classroom and not attempt to be engaging and...I'm just gonna say it. Sparkling. Entertaining. If I'm lecturing, I have to try to be funny. If I'm leading discussion, I turn into Phil Donahue (it's not pretty. But it is entertaining). There are a great number of scholars out there I'm not gonna name because I don't remember and I'm not about to look them up who have written about teaching-as-performance, but if I remember correctly, the "performance" aspect of teaching is written about as "taking on a different Self" or "Performing an I" or something to that effect. Here's how little I think of Theory: I can't even tell you what school of thought this comes from. I think it's got something to do with speech acts and Saussure and Lyotard...you know, fuckin' French guys. I don't care, because the ideas themselves make sense to me, as annoyingly as they're expressed. They're quite simple (which annoying theorists will tell you is precisely why they must be described with difficult terminology): each of us has multiple aspects to our identity. There's the daughter-me, the student-me, the sister-me, the teacher-me, etc. and each of these identities involves a distinct (though sometimes overlapping) set of behaviors and language rules (for lack of a better word). Some of us feel the distinction between these identities more than others. Then you get into freaky-ass shit like, "No one is ever fully synchronized, all identity is fragmented, the "I" is never complete," yada yada yada. This is not my point.

My point is that the way this performative theory is expressed gets in the way of what the real issue is: teaching is acting. And I don't mean to get into a whole "acting" is "performance" kind of circular discussion, because of course theater performance has theory behind it. I mean in the most concrete and simple way, teaching is like being on stage. There's an instant connection (or, worst case, no connection) between you and your students/audience. You can tell when they're with you and when they're against you. Cell phones frequently go off (and here's where teaching is better than acting, because I can boot the offender out of the room).

This of course brings me to movies about teachers. Have you noticed how many of them are about English teachers? Have you noticed how many of them are just utterly and completely ridiculous? My favorite of these is Barbra Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces, where she knows the names of the students in her 300+ lecture class, and they all applaud her at the end of class. (I was a student in a 300+ lecture class that did applaud once. It was my Sociology of Sex Roles class, and that day was about female sexuality and the history behind the revolutionary idea that women could have orgasms. The professor read a letter from a 65-year-old woman who had participated in one of those orgasm seminars from the 70s, to the woman [whose name escapes me] who had organized the seminar, and it was about how she'd lived her whole life without having an orgasm, but after the seminar she went home, ran a bath, lit some candles, touched herself, and whammo. Yeah. We applauded. You should be applauding right now, too.)

I suspect that a significant number of graduate students in my program opted for teaching as a career based on these movies, seduced by the meaningful--and instant--life-changing impact Robin Williams and Michelle Pfeiffer have on their students. These are the students for whom teaching gets really old, really boring, really fast. Because that life-changing impact? Doesn't happen. Once in a great while, maybe. But you can't expect that your three hours a week contact with students is going to make them all better people. At best, by the end of 15 weeks they'll know the punctuation/quotation marks rule. And even that sometimes is too much to expect.

Student expectations of teachers, on the other hand, are way out of control. They see the movies too, and they do expect Robin Williams or Michelle Pfeiffer to lead their classes. Not all of them. No one expects an Economics I prof to throw down an interactive lesson in conformity. But the English classes...students show up expecting to be entertained. Mark Edmundson had an article in Harper's quite a few years ago--I had just started teaching then--about this, claiming that university administrations encourage humanities professors to create edutaining courses in order to attract students who have come to view their university experience not as one of higher learning, but of consumerism. Give the customers what they want.

The party line response to this is to condemn it, and bemoan the devaluing of intellect and scholarship. But I do think that entertainment is a part of education. Of course, I grew up with Schoolhouse Rock. (Quick, all you Gen-Xers: sing me the Preamble to the Constitution.) The problem with entertainment in the classroom is when students think they need it in order to learn something. That unless they're having fun, they're not going to get anything out of the class. Does it surprise you that few of them know the difference, or that when asked, they'll tell you that they'd rather have fun than learn stuff? This is the kind of stuff that winds up on teacher evaluations, which have been relied on more and more for stuff like tenure decisions. "The class was boring" vs. "I always wanted to go to class because it was fun." Neither one of these sentences says anything about what the student might have actually learned.

I doubt I'm alone in enjoying the performative aspects of teaching. I like the attention, being in the spotlight, having anywhere from 15 to 35 minds (or at least a decent percentage of them) tuned in to what I'm telling them. It kinda gets me high. So I do make an effort to make the classroom a relaxed and fun space, so that even something as dull as "dangling modifiers" gets a small boost from goofy practice sentences. Maybe I try too hard sometimes. Maybe the part of me that desperately needs to be liked by everyone all the time seeps into my teaching so that, on occasion, I'm focused less on What's Important than on Please Please Please Love Me. I've been teaching for going on eight years now and I'm still sorting this one out--that delicate balance between imparting knowledge and keeping students engaged. What I've learned? They are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, to hell with students needing to have fun. I need it, too. I already know this stuff. How else am I going to make it through the lesson plans, the student conferences, the endless grading, if I can't make it enjoyable for me?

This is either a fantastic idea or a humidity-infused insomnia-inspired disaster-in-waiting. I'm trying something different this month, and focusing less on knitting and the daily grind and more on...some other kind of writing. I just feel the need to push myself in a different direction. I'm going to kick things off with something I scribbled back in November 2001 and never finished. It's still not finished, because I can't do endings.


Mattricide is never pretty.

There are few remnants of my time spent in Ohio left in my life, not counting academic residue (and I've long treated the English department as something existing in a completely different space and time from the rest of SW Ohio, an oasis as it were). It's almost as if I broke up with Ohio rather messily and just took off, leaving Ohio to deal with the crap I left behind. Mostly what I'm left with are painful memories best unloaded on a high-priced therapist. Then there's my bed, which could be considered one of the best things to come out of my relationship with Ohio (we all have those trinkets from failed relationships, right? It could be something small like a CD or book you borrowed or were given, or, you know, like a child or something). It may have come from a bland strip mall suburb of Cincinnati, but it was the first major piece of unused furniture I've ever purchased.

I was--and still am--a total novice when it comes to buying grown-up stuff like mattresses and box springs. I had no idea they could get up to $4000. That's how much I sold my car for. I also had no clear sense of what kind of mattress was best for me: soft, firm, medium, Roncomatic adjustable. I had recently discovered that what I thought was perfect for me wasn't right at all…and that was a main reason for purchasing a new mattress and burning the old one while dancing around with painted body and amulets made of local foliage in that time-honored universal purification ritual. The other main reason was that I'd had my old bed for about seven years, and I'd bought it used from a coworker for $20, and it wasn't performing at adequate bed levels anymore. Coils weren't poking out, but they were close. The whole bed angled downward from the headboard, which was a monstrously oppressive piece made of heavy dark wood, and the metal frame was a death trap, as the scars on my ankles attest. This was not a welcoming sanctuary of slumber, and it was time for it to go.

Luckily I had my friend Lisa with me, both for moral support and to provide tips on finding the best mattress deal. I jumped on a bunch of mattresses, but they didn't feel right, which started to make me question whether the problem was me, and whether I needed to tell myself that I was worthy of a good mattress. I wanted a new frame as well, but there weren't any at this store that weren't chunky wood, and I'd decided that I was more of a wrought iron gal. Lisa talked me into getting on a mattress that I wouldn't have thought twice about because it had one of those poofy things on the top, like an extra layer of poof in a mattress, that I had tried in a different mattress and found not too my liking (too lumpy). I sat down on the edge of the mattress, and bounced a little. Not bad.

Then Dudley showed up. About my height, slightly stooped, Junior Soprano glasses, liver spots on his hand and a slight slur to his speech, as though he had had a stroke some years back. Sweet-faced elderly man, the kind that are usually phased out of big chain stores. I would've put his age in the 70s. I believe he's shilling for Six Flags now. Dudley told me that the mattress I was sitting on was a quality mattress and I wouldn't be able to find a better deal in town. "Go ahead, lie all the way down, put your feet up," he urged. So I did, and decided that this mattress was very nice. The mattress seemed to agree, and softly whispered that it would take care of me. That was moving a little too fast for me, and I got a little scared, and told Dudley that I wanted to look at a couple other places before I committed. "Eh," he said dismissively but friendly-like, "you won't find a better price." "In which case I'll be back," I said.

"I hate my competitors," he said, with a spark in his eyes.

"Of course you do," I told him.

I had hoped to find the perfect headboard, so Lisa and I went to another store, but it was too showy. Everything there tried too hard, tarted up in fine sheets and coordinating comforters and decorative pillows, and I saw right through it. I did find a bright springy comforter cover inspired by French Provencal designs, and I flirted with it a bit, but it was more expensive than the mattress I couldn't get out of my head. Lisa and I stopped for lunch, and then returned to Dudley.

He was helping another couple, and though Lisa told me someone else could close the deal, I wanted Dudley. Something about someone past the age of retirement still working fills me with hope and inspiration. Plus, every old man reminds me in some way of the grandfather I lived with, who died a little over seven years ago, who never denied me the chance to play Cinderella when I was five, and who constructed a yellow brick road in our back yard. When Dudley turned my way, the genuine look of happiness on his face was my sign that I was about to purchase the mattress of my dreams. The mattress that would make me look forward to sleeping every night. The mattress that signified my new beginning, my new life, my new source of strength. Maybe not. But he looked really happy. I told him I was ready to buy the mattress and box spring and he immediately started filling out the paperwork.

During our lunch, Lisa had cautioned me not to agree to the extra stain protectant seal. You know, that chemical concoction that isn't necessary for anything (I mean, I've got a mattress pad. And who's going to see a stain on the mattress, anyway?) but winds up costing about $50 more…like the extra 3-year warranty on electronics equipment, or the Tru-Coat seal on the car that William H. Macy is selling in Fargo. I had no intention of agreeing to the stain protectant, but I was glad that she had my back, particularly since we both knew that Dudley would be the kind of old-school salesman that wouldn't take no for an answer, and that he was such a sweet old guy that my resolve would weaken. I'm not going to take the stain shield. Not going to take the stain shield. Not going to, no.

Turns out, I need not have toughened up. Dudley fills out the purchase form, and when he gets to the Stain Shield option, without even looking up, he says, "That stain protectant is just a bunch of junk you don't need," and checks the "No" box. Lisa and I look at each other, stunned into near laughter-I have a mad impulsive wish to tip the guy. Dudley continues to fill out the form, chatting to us about the university we attend-his granddaughter had graduated from there a few years back (it's that kind of town). Suddenly he says, "I'm getting old. I'm drooling." I look down on the form and sure enough, there's a little spot of wetness on it. I think about the reaction of the kind of person I'm not-which would be to break into derisive laughter as soon as Dudley was out of ear and eyeshot. I tend to do that-to immediately think of the worst possible reaction a person could have, and then avoid it. I'm not sure why-maybe a sense of identification with people like Dudley, who I'm sure would not have chosen to drool in public but couldn't help it-maybe it's a reminder of when I was myself the object of derision for a handful of reasons. Lisa and I do exchange looks, but it's more of an unspoken "Did he say what I think he said?" "Yes, he most certainly did" exchange.

"Maybe you're just hungry," I offer in the need that I have to fill any sort of awkward silence. I don't think he heard me, but I thought Lisa was going to lose it. She thought I was ridiculing him, but I hadn't meant to be nasty. I just didn't want him to feel bad about drooling on my purchase form.

We said goodbye to Dudley and took the forms to the checkout counter. The guy behind the counter grinned. "Dudley helped you? That guy's a character." Whatever that means. "He was great," I said. "Very classy."

The cashier leaned over the counter and said with a raised eyebrow, "How old would you say he is?"

We said 70-ish.

"He's 81." That got me thinking. Had Dudley always worked at Value City? Had he always been a mattress salesman? Is it wrong to feel sad that a person can spend fifty years or more doing the same thing, when that thing is something as monotonous as selling bedroom sets? Or was he the kind of salesman that lived for the sale, and the actual product didn't matter? These were questions the cashier couldn't answer. I took my purchase slip home, and two days later a couple of beefy guys showed up to dispose of my old bed, and set up the new one.