PASSAGES
I was walking around downtown Asheville the other day among tourists from all over the world and local people shopping. A quite pregnant woman with a kid in the stroller asked me the way to Prichard Park. It was right around the corner I said and when I came around the corner there she was getting into the car of someone, probably her husband, who must have told her he would pick her up at Prichard Park.
There is nothing remarkable about this observation. It is too ordinary even to mention. But it got me thinking.
This was the only time in either of our lives that I was going to talk to this woman. She has lived a very complicated and interesting life up until this point and so have I. Yet we know nothing about each other. We intersected in a polite and pleasant way and that is it, nothing more.
And yet if I were to know the full life story of all of the people I briefly touch during a walk through Asheville how complicated and interesting that would be. If I could fully listen to all these people instead of being absorbed in my own passage, barely paying attention to anyone else, how rich my experience of what it is to be human would be. I only know my own experience.
Later I was sitting in the Food Court in the former art deco S&W Cafeteria when I overheard a young man and woman talking. I don’t remember what they talked about, all I remember was wondering how they were both speaking the same complicated English language that I speak and what was even more striking was that their intonation and facial movements and repeated cliches were just the same as every other young person I meet. It wasn’t what they said but the stylized way in which they said it that knocked me out. They are part of an enormous tribe of people who speak, smile, wear the same clothes as everyone else. If I were in Paris or Mumbai or Naoussa people would be sharing the same cultural norms as everyone else, only I wouldn’t recognize it. For some reason this struck me as a very odd way to make your passage through life, being just like everyone else.
So anyway, walking through Asheville the other day, this is what went through my mind.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 