It was a snowy Friday afternoon, my cord of firewood wouldn’t be delivered for another week, and with a frozen weekend coming up, the stack on my patio was getting perilously low. Time for a visit to the landscaping yard.
This is how it works: You drive over a scale that weighs your vehicle, drive into the yard, load up what you need — in my case, about 200 pounds of pine — then drive over the same scale. The yard employee calculates the difference, and you pay for your firewood in line with folks buying tons of gravel or cement.
I found the woodstacks, pulled in and opened my trunk. Up pulled a silver-haired gentleman in a Carhartt jacket and a white pickup.
We said our hellos, and he opened the conversation.
“How you likin’ that little Toyota?”
I like my Yaris just fine, I told him. It gets me around, carries a stack of firewood, I can get my bike in it and I’ve driven across country twice with no trouble — and on 40 miles to a gallon of gas.
He was suitably impressed, and wanted to know why I traveled cross-country (to visit my parents). We shared that on long drives, we both love listening to the history of the whaling ship Essex, one of the stories that inspired Melville’s “Moby Dick,” on our cars’ CD players.
We kept the conversation resolutely in the first person singular — rare with people our age. I am in a relationship, but there’s nothing wrong with a conversation that doesn’t include names, or flirting, but also doesn’t mention one’s commitments. No doubt he felt the same.
He asked if I heated my house with firewood, and I said I did — it seemed cooler not to mention the strategically located electric heaters that help with the enterprise.
He’d arrived in Colorado Springs in 1994, and asked how long I’d lived here. My accent came up, of course, as I said that I’d come, as an immigrant, with my family, from Czechoslovakia in 1968, after the invasion of the Soviet bloc. He expressed profound admiration for my parents, who had the courage to start a completely new life in a foreign land.
It was a lovely conversation, really.
My firewood was loaded, and I drove back over the scales and headed to the office to pay. The man with whom I’d spent the last 30 minutes or so chatting came up behind me. He seemed much less cordial than he’d been while loading firewood. In fact, he seemed almost curt.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise,” he replied. Not smiling.
That’s when I realized that he’d seen my “99% for Obama 2012” bumper sticker. On his pickup, I’d noted, his read “Romney-Ryan” and “I was wrong — he’s worse than Carter.”
Ah, politics. It stops things before they start. And that’s probably a good thing.
Eva Syrovy is an educator in Colorado Springs. She was a member of the 2010 Colorado Voices panel.
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