Bagel Trip

This is a story I’ve told on the internet before, but with a new ending, given the time that has passed since telling it.

Bagel Trip

I’m not a big fan of breakfast food in general, but the bagel holds a special place in my heart, so I was feeling pretty good walking into downtown Maplewood, anticipating a visit to the Bagel Chateau. It was brisk that saturday morning, so I’d grabbed a hoodie as I walked out the door, and the night of poker that ended a few hours earlier accounted for the bagginess of my eyes, almost equal to that of my jeans. Still, I was excited for my bagel and the weekend, so my spirits were up, even if I didn’t look it.

The easiest walking path to the Bagel Chateau takes you past a park that features a Little League field and Maplewood’s unofficial dog walkers’ hang out, both of which also bolstered my mood. For me, dogs and baseball both symbolize youthful exuberence and a reminder to enjoy life, as well as being generally pleasing in their own right. Youthful exuberence probably did not need to be symbolized in this situation; there was a toddler skipping behind me and gaining fast, but I’m addicted to metaphor and don’t really know where I stand on toddlers as a group.

Had I been paying attention it would have confused me that there was no one who looked like a parent on the heels of the toddler in question. As it was, I didn’t start paying attention until she passed me and tripped over a patch of uneven sidewalk, just a few steps ahead. A quick look for her parents revealed that I was the only person around to take action.

My first instinct was to comfort the fallen, who was now crying and inspecting her skinned knee. I checked myself, though, imagining a scraggly teenager kneeling over a crying toddler and the doubled worry of a parent observing this stranger. As I wondered if my being there would comfort the girl or spook her further- and how all this might play to an imagined protective mother, her real mother rounded a corner, swept her up, and smiled at me as if to say “Thanks for looking out for her.”

The mother’s gratitude highlighted for me how silly it was to stop to consider what concern for the helpless looks like. What was I going to do, run home to shave before lending a helping hand?

I suppose we are all sometimes confronted with aspects of our nature that we’d like to change. That’s how we learn that we’d like to change them. The same situation hasn’t come up again (even given subsequent trips to the Bagel Chateau) but I know that now, several years later, I wouldn’t hesitate to help. Then again, I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve grown as a person or if it’s because I finally like my haircut.

A & Police

The A&P a couple blocks from Columbia High School got a lot of business from students at lunch time. This was largely because of their stock of cheap pizza bagels and off brand soda. The soda, in particular, was a deal at 50 cents a can, better than many vending machines.

I can only imagine the pizza bagels were there to target our market, but despite devoting a section of his store to us, the A&P manager seemed uncomfortable with having high school kids in his supermarket. His worries set the stage for the experience of your friend and mine, Buddy.

On one particular visit, Buddy placed one of the off brand soda cans in his pocket. It’s not clear to me whether he intended to steal it or, more benignly, to use the pocket as a means of carrying the can around while deciding what else he wanted to buy. Soda cans do have a way of attracting condensation and getting slippery in your hand, after all. The world never got a chance to know, as before Buddy could approach a cash register, the manager pulled him aside and informed him that the police were on their way.

The manager’s suspicion was probably reasonable, but it’s strange to me that he’d call the police before Buddy had a chance to actually do anything illegal. That seems to weaken his case unnecessarily. He might also have accosted him and said something like “I hope you’re planning on paying for that,” as a way of getting his point across and making sure he recorded the sale without complicating the situation further. Nonetheless, he went ahead and led Buddy to an office where he could wait.

As it turns out, when the police got there, they sided with Buddy, pointing out that he hadn’t done anything to warrant the call. It turns out that they’d been frustrated before with the A&P manager for having a quick trigger finger that both the school and police department saw as unjustified. Perhaps bound by some set of rules, they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything unless Buddy had actually stolen the soda.

Notably, all this happened as the result of deep pockets and a fifty cent soda. If the pockets were deep enough to fit the can, I’d think there’d also be fifty cents in there somewhere.

Seeing

I was walking down a dark path at night. It seemed deserted, for more than my lack of vision in the midnight fog. It was then I heard something; much like an animal, perhaps it was that I noticed her. A girl, barely twenty, dressed in a style, but not the colors, to catch the eye. Logically, she was out of place, but from her comfort level and color palette, I was unconvinced. I called to her, “Hello, are you lost?” Unwilling to admit I might be.

She greeted me by name, much to my surprise. Did show know me? “What are you looking for?” she then asked me, skipping all pleasantries. She hadn’t answered my question.

“I seek civilization; in walking I seem to have left it behind. I seek food but mostly shelter.” I was slightly unnerved, but saw little reason to not answer her.

Shifting her weight to one leg, bending the other slightly, and tilting her head, she said, “Now tell me something everyone else doesn’t.” My eyes widened at her newfound personality. She continued, “You have to be looking for more than that. You must want more than a tent and a potato. How should I know if you’d prefer steak to goose?”

This line of reasoning took me back. Beggars were not choosers so the cliché goes, but I didn’t want to lose face. At the same time, it took a fake confidence to say, “I’d take steak over goose, most days.” As I uttered my words, it felt like foolishness spilling over my lips. The look she gave me in return assured me of such. When presented with a choice, one has already stopped being the beggar. Yet we are doomed to unhappiness, even with choices, if we don’t know what we want. It isn’t about steak or goose. The tent would have been too little, and a palace would have been too much. Regardless of what I was really being offered, how could I get what is closest to what I want if I don’t know what that is?

“But you’ll take the tent then?” she squeezed the words out of her smirk. Putting her hand to her hip she added, “I’ll do my best to find you a good steak if it’s what you really want.”

What I really wanted. But was it? I found myself terribly uncertain. She had extended her hand to me, and I took it, charmed at her gesture. She took me back the way she had seemed to come from. Walking through the mist of the night, we came to a bazaar. It had an eerie air to it, but a strange charm to those offering it. A bazaar of wheeled kiosks with paper lanterns at night was something I had expected to unnerve or mesmerize me. It did neither to any extreme.

An old man sold boxes of various sizes and incredibly specific purposes. He called out softly, “utensil boxes, piano roll cartons, and more, dividers come free,” from beneath his short white beard. “I bet he has a special shaped box for his teeth,” I said to my young guide, and she made a face at me. A young girl had shelves filled with only creatures that kept well in fish bowls of different sizes. Fish, scorpions, turtles, beetles, frogs, and things I didn’t recognize moved about their respective bowls, to some extent reacting to one another. I joked in her ear, “I bet she kissed them all and was disappointed at the results.” She playfully hit me in the arm. A pale, thin fellow sold paper lanterns. They cast their colors upon him, and he changed with their luminescence. Some were for luck, others for attracting women, and just a few for communicating with the world beyond. Perhaps he was so frail because of all these forces constantly pulling at him. I wanted to make another joke but was distracted by a change in her warm grip. She hadn’t paid so much attention to the impressionable lantern man, she was looking for a good steak for me.

Approaching the butcher, I told my escort, “I can’t make fun of him, his knife is too big.” She suggested I try anyway. We reached the butcher, a hearty man with a dark beard and an apron. He had the ill placement of being next to a shrill woman who sold nothing but stone cats in many different cat poses. Despite what I viewed as his misfortune, he greeted us with a large smile and a question, “What are you looking for?”

I was looking. It was in looking over his goods I realized, I would know it when I saw it. In seeing it, was truly wanting it. Not how it seemed to someone else, or how it looked to someone else. Not what it might be, but what it was to me. She couldn’t have found it for me, but she knew how I needed to search. Maybe she even knew why. I couldn’t have described the steak, and I could have been happy with a lesser steak. It wasn’t about choosing for myself, though I was the happier for it. It was about connecting to the experience.

Had I been looking for her? I wouldn’t have known among the mists, I would not have known as we passed the first wheeled kiosks of the bazaar, but seeing her, the way she was in those moments, made me know. I didn’t know if she had been looking for me though, there was the trouble. I was sure however, that she knew, when she saw me.

Flagpole

The Adlai Stevenson Game described in an earlier pencilgeist entry was not the first time a story has come out of a metasocial game. Consider this its prequel.

The summer after my freshman year of college I got a job with Habitat for Humanity in Morris County. Having been a volunteer for HfH before and having done a little construction work in my own right, my job was to train and lead groups of volunteers, freeing up the construction manager to work with other volunteers or attend to more advanced details. Seeing progress on our various construction sites over the course of the summer was fun, as was teaching my volunteer groups, but the best thing about the job was that it meant I was home for the summer. That meant, of course, recreating the things that were fun about high school: seeing old friends, eating at all the old places, playing all the old games.

On my first day back in town, high school was still in session, so John, Max, and I went back to CHS to find Buddy. Somewhere in the nostalgia it came up that Buddy, when suggesting something to do, often said “Let’s just run this up the flagpole and see who salutes,” using it to mean “Does this idea sound good?”

When school let out and we got a hold of Buddy, John brought up the flagpole expression, and Buddy denied having ever said it. This turned into an argument, with both positions becoming increasingly radical. John ended up at “You said it every day,” and Buddy at “I’ve never even heard anyone say it.”

The only way to settle the question was to ask other people we’d known back then what they remembered. Amazingly, it turned out that they fell on roughly the same lines, not just failing to remember or thinking he might have said it once or twice, but consistently insisting that he either said it all the time or not at all. The polling numbers split perfectly. Only Max stuck to a moderate position: that Buddy said it sometimes.

My position was and continues to be that he must have said it. It’s easy to imagine someone forgetting a friend’s catchphrase after it falls out of use, or a phrase being used only in certain company, thereby accounting for the split polling. It’s comparably hard to imagine John, Max, and I all independently inventing the memory of its repetition.

The disagreement was eventually dropped, but not the idea. A few days later Max, John, Shawn, and I were at Max’s house for a poker game. One of us called Buddy to invite him, but he said he couldn’t make it. A while later, John suggested calling him back to find out whether he’d be around later that night. I did, and when he answered I started with “Hey Buddy, let me just run this up the flagpole and see if you salute, poker later tonight?”

Buddy explained that he’d be with his girlfriend (Megan), and I relayed that to the group. Not satisfied, John called him, said simply “flagpole,” and hung up.

As this was happening, Max’s sister Kate walked in. She asked what was going on, and we walked through the context. “I have Meg’s number,” she offered, and in so doing set off the flagpole experiment.

Kate called Megan and asked her to say flagpole to Buddy. Megan was baffled, but acquiesced, and when Buddy reacted she was able to honestly say that it was not any of John, me, Max, or Shawn who asked her to do it. He didn’t guess Kate.

As we were laughing about this, Max’s mom overheard us and volunteered that she and Meg’s mom were friends. So, she called and asked her to find the two of them, repeat “flagpole,” and report back. She was a good sport and played along.

At this point, the joke was put aside for the night, but we realized later that the last move was particularly good because it involved enough of a workaround (Buddy wouldn’t, previous to her being involved, suspect us to be in touch with his girlfriend’s mom, especially not in such a way that she’d help carry out a practical joke) to make him wonder how big the conspiracy was.

A few days later Max and I discussed ways to expand on this and to make the game more interesting. Over the course of the following few days, we got in touch with a teacher I’d gotten along with in high school who agreed to write flagpole on the board as Buddy was entering class. We got a few friends from circles Buddy didn’t run in to drive past him on his way home from school and yell flagpole out their window. We got his friends to make a big deal of standing around the flagpole in front of the school at lunch time.

Once school let out, we adapted to the summer. Jimmy, who Buddy has yet to meet, took a picture of a flagpole with his cell phone and texted it to him with a message asking if he would salute. Kate had an envelope with official CHS letterhead, so we addressed it to Buddy’s parents and mailed him a diagram of an idea being run up a flagpole and several stick figures saluting. Max’s mom used her office stationary to mail him a photocopy of the diagram. John and I bought some miniature flags from the dollar store, scrawled “Hey Buddy” on them, and slipped them through the mail slot at his house at night.

Eventually, the game was dropped, and I’ve never asked Buddy what it was like to experience it from his end. My hope is that what started out as an innocent (if stupid) running joke became an astonishment, each new mention leading him to wonder how far we were willing to go to make the word reoccur. I’d like to think that somewhere between text messages from numbers he didn’t recognize and the flags slipped through his mail slot, Buddy began to see flagpole references in places we didn’t or couldn’t plan- finding them in the clouds, his mind racing back to the expression whenever someone happened to mention one of its parts.