By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
I think about a conversation I had a while back a lot.
I was getting a tire patched at my local guy’s shop. Sitting there in the tiny, rubber-scented waiting room, there was another guy across from me. An old-timer who wasn’t staring into the void of his phone. Me, I’m naturally curious, so we got to talking. Turns out, like me, he’s a Chicago guy. Well, he’s an Italian immigrant who lived in Chicago for 60 years. We start chopping it up about the Bears, the White Sox, the city, and how people in Chicago talk with one another. Even if you’re not friends, people wave, they smile, they BS over whatever.
“Here, everyone does the same thing: they pull into the driveway, garage door goes up, car goes in, door goes down. I don’t know nobody.”
He told me he moved out of the city to be near his kid. His kid moved back, and it was just him and his wife. They were both in their eighties, and another move wasn’t in the cards. The kid came down a lot, but that’s different than being a text away.
Here’s the part that gets me. I fly to Madrid, to Lisbon, to Barcelona, and I write whole essays about the neighbors over there who still talk to each other, who howl behind closed shutters, who haven’t forgotten how to be alive. I go looking for it across an ocean. And the most alive guy I’d met in months was sitting ten feet away from me in a tire shop ten minutes from my house. I didn’t need a passport. I needed a nail in my tire.
If I’d been scrolling, I’d have missed him.
After that old timer is pushing up daisies, I’ll think about him. About a moment we shared. Got some laughs, talked about how bad the pizza is around here, but mostly it was two strangers doing something a lot of us used to do: communicate and see one another at face value. We probably didn’t agree about political stuff; maybe we did, but it never came up. He didn’t put it on front street, and neither did I.
The kids love to use the phrase “NPC” for the rest of the world moving at its own pace, and that’s a sad framing. Everyone should be a possible conversation. It’s not that you have to, but it’s possible. There’s a difference in that point of view. Look up from the phone. Ask how someone’s day is with sincerity, and maybe you’ll get the conversation you need. We all need different kinds of medicine at different points. Maybe you’ll wind up talking about the Chicago Bears.
As I got up, he said, “Hey, maybe I’ll see you back home.”
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