Cusp

A couple of days ago, I bought a cupcake at a bakery on my way home from work. That wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but in my world, it was.

I’m pretty obsessive about my weight, seldom allowing myself such fat-and-calorie-laden decadence. But this was a celebratory cupcake. A cupcake purchased specifically to mark an event that last occurred on September 12, 1992—the waning days of the George HW Bush administration, for some way-back machine perspective.  A cupcake that, ideally, I would eat sometime around 11:30 that night, as soon as the Pittsburgh Pirates had wrapped up and made official the 82nd victory of their baseball season. The victory that would assure them a winning record of 82-80, even were they to lose all 24 of their remaining games.

This was Wednesday night. The team was in Milwaukee, facing a woeful Brewers squad that hits particularly poorly against left-handed pitchers. On the mound for the visiting Buccaneers was southpaw Francisco Liriano, who is in the midst of an outstanding season and most recently pitched eight shutout innings against the formidable St Louis Cardinals, with whom the Pirates are improbably vying for first place in the National League’s Central Division. The stage was set for history to be made, and for my near-midnight snack to be consumed.

That didn’t happen. Liriano quickly turned from powerhouse to punching bag. By the end of three innings the Pirates were down 7-2, and, given that offense is not the team’s strong suit, it was evident that win number 82 wasn’t going to happen this night. Lynn advised me to freeze the cupcake, lest it become as stale as are my team’s 20 years of futility. Into the freezer my bakery item went. The Brewers were leading 9-3 in the eighth inning when I went to bed. In the morning, my smartphone told me I’d been smart not to bother staying up. The final score was exactly 9-3.

Thursday—yesterday—was an off day. The Pirates are back in action later tonight, in St Louis. The Cardinals’ home record is 41-25, while the Pirates’ road mark is 36-33. The Redbirds’ pitcher will be right-hander Joe Kelly, who’s put together a string of outstanding starts, including six innings of one-run ball in a St Louis victory over the Pirates last Sunday in Pittsburgh. So, the odds would seem to be against win number 82 coming tonight. Which is why I sort of suspect it will come. Baseball is funny that way. Just when you think you have it figured out, a star gets injured, or a slugger chokes, or a benchwarmer gets the big hit. The counterintuitive steals the limelight from the expected. At any rate, I’ll be monitoring the game’s progress closely on TV, PC and/or smartphone, ready to defrost and eat that celebratory cupcake if and when victory is achieved.

Any freezer-related flavor degradation will be lost on me. That cupcake will taste great to me tonight, tomorrow night, Sunday afternoon, next week—whenever that next win comes. My baseball-fan friends don’t get it. They’ve been telling me my focus should be on whether the Pirates will win the division or instead have to settle for a wild-card spot. They note that with three weeks left in the regular season, a winning record is certain and a playoff spot nearly a lock, given that the Bucs own an 81-58 record and a 10-game lead in the wild-card race. They think my eyes should be focused unblinkingly on the prize of postseason baseball.

But those people haven’t endured the two decades in the wilderness that Pirates’ fans have—an unholy mating of cheap and clueless ownership with bad players and worse luck. Much has changed for the better of late, and even the horrendous late-season collapse that guaranteed a 20th consecutive losing season in 2012 doesn’t sting nearly so badly anymore. The present is bright, the future promising. But I’ve seen too much to get ahead of myself.

First things first. I was a 34-year-old single newspaper reporter living in Savannah, Georgia, the last time I scanned the regular-season final standings and saw a winning percentage of .500 or better next to the Pirates’ won-lost record. To pervert the old football quote, 82 might not be everything, but to me it’s really the only thing.

I will feast on it.

Of Brits and Bumper Stickers

Not that there’s any indication the world has noticed, but I haven’t posted to this blog in more than a month. I feel as if I’ve been failing to do my job for a long time now, posting with great infrequency. But then, that’s a big part of the problem: I’ve been thinking of this blog as a job. I’ve too often approached it as I do my day job—meticulously. In this case, as a process that begins with a specific idea and ends several hours later, after I’ve agonized over precisely which thousand or two words to employ, in what exact combinations.

I need a new approach. So, today I’m going to write off-the-cuff about a few different subjects, none individually at great length. Being me, though, I still like the idea of a unifying theme. It took me a while to come up with one, but then it hit me: Clive and Karen Scorer.

Clive and Karen are brilliant. Not necessarily in the IQ sense, although they’re certainly both smart enough. I don’t know if they’ve ever been tested—or, if so, what their numbers are. No, I mean in the British usage of the word brilliant. Clive and Karen are British, and what Lynn and I found when we met them in Iceland in the summer of 1999 is that they and their countrypersons use “brilliant” as a catch-all for anything that’s good to exceptional. To be sure, like our “awesome,” it’s a word that’s subject to being overused, and thus overextended to many things that are little better than fine or just OK. Still, I think of Clive and Karen as brilliant in a more effusive sense. They’re nice and kind and interesting, and it doesn’t hurt in Lynn’s and my book that they are roughly our age and, like us, childless by choice and crazy about cats. Their senses of humor tend toward the droll in that classically British kind of way. And of course, if they were writing the word” humor” as I just did, they’d stick an utterly superfluous “u” between the “o” and the “r” and insist that that is the only correct spelling. Which is, in my American eyes, rather brilliantly quaint.

So, anyway, that’s them. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and last fall we met up with them on Cape Cod, where their bus full of fellow Brits had stopped as part of a sightseeing/leaf-watching tour across Massachusetts and New Hampshire. One day the four of us rode in my car to Provincetown, on the other side of the Cape. That was a fun day, but its relation to this post has to do with the fact that Clive noted my several bumper stickers. Now, I don’t know if bumper stickers are rare in the UK or if Clive, in his somewhat reserved British way, deemed my sporting more than one to be excessive (I believe my bumper displayed a total of four stickers or decals at the time). At at any rate, when earlier this year I mentioned in an e-mail that I needed to have my bumper replaced, he cheekily inquired as to whether the old one had fallen off under the weight of my stickers.

First of all, wrong bumper. It was the front one that needed to be replaced. Second of all, snide British remarks aside, I like bumper stickers as a form of self-expression, as long as they aren’t lame. And by that, I mean lame in my own idiosyncratic estimation. Lame by my lights is anything from expressing one’s support for politicians and causes I deem abhorrent to insisting on advertising to the world that one’s child is an honor roll student at a given elementary school (damning with faint praise, plus, who cares?) or depicting one’s family with a like number and representational mix of stick figures (this being the inane “Baby on Board” of the 21st century). Also lame: too many bumper stickers. Show me the rear end of a car that’s plastered with stickers and decals and I’ll show you a vehicle that is the automotive mascot of the TV show Hoarders and a driver who, I fear, may be off his or her meds.

(Brief aside. Bumper stickers as self-expression: Acceptable, within reason. But, as regards another form of modern self-expression: Why must everyone have an array of damn tattoos? Nowadays, being tattoo-free is more an expression of uniqueness than are the veritable ink galleries garishly splashed across the fat asses and love handles of so many Americans.)

Anyway, I recently decided my old bumper stickers needed to go. Or at least some of them. Like the one advocating for gay marriage in Maryland, which was approved last fall. And the “equal” sign logo of the Human Rights Campaign, which now adorns every other bumper in the area, making me look trendier than I’d like. Also, while I enjoy trumpeting my cat love given the preponderance of pro-dog bumper stickers on the road, my “Meow” decal was looking tired and uninteresting. So, last weekend I spend considerable time scouring the web for replacement images and messages.

Here’s what I came up with:

·         A cat face in revolutionary red, framed by the words “Viva el Gato!”, with an added exclamation point upside-down at beginning of the sentence, in Spanish-language manner. (Pro-cat, but with attitude—something cats have in abundance.)  

 
·         One of those slash-marked red circles that mean “anti” or “no,” with the word “Guns” inside it. (I could’ve purchased one that slashed through the letters “NRA,” but in this weapons-mad country I consider my chosen design to be risky enough. Were I to call out  the NRA specifically, I'm fairly certain that my car, unlike the gasoline that fuels it, soon would be leaded.)

·         Two stickers related to my love of grammar and wordplay. I’ll likely display one or the other, but likely not both. One says. “Always proofread. You might have something out.” The other is a punchline that reads like the setup to a joke: “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.”

I’m pleased. My one regret, though, is that I couldn’t find a bumper sticker nuanced enough to convey that while, from a “green” standpoint, I can see the wisdom of sharing the road with cyclists, the fact is that they’re hugely full of themselves, want to be treated like motorists but don’t follow traffic laws, make the roads far less safe for everyone, and I pretty much hate them all. To be fair, though, that’d be a lot for one bumper sticker to convey.

Anyway. I also thought of Clive and Karen recently when I stumbled across my new favorite word: “rumbustious.” One fraught morning recently, I needed to take a break from my workday, so I searched the Internet for an offbeat international story to amuse myself and perhaps share with a friend. I happened to find an Agence France-Press wire story that grabbed me with its headline: “China to Fine Sloppy Pee-ers.” The piece explained that officials in the Chinese city of Shenzen are planning to crack down on men who urinate outside the bowl in public facilities. (One guesses this is because China hasn’t any bigger problems in terms either of environmental degradation or societal grossness.) The article went on to note that the edict has been met with derision by Shenzen citizens, who smell both a governmental money-making scheme and an enforcement issue that raises the specter of uniformed aim-enforcers being stationed in restrooms. (Talk about your yellow perils!)

Suddenly I came upon the following sentence: “Users of China’s rumbustious weibo [Twitter-like] social networks poured scorn upon the measures.” “Rumbustious?” I loved the way it looked, and the way it sounded when I spoke it. But was it really a word? Could it have been some sort of mistake—a bad translation of French to English, perhaps? So, I looked it up online, and discovered that it is a “chiefly British” word that means “uncontrollably exuberant and unruly.” It’s more or less synonymous with what we Americans would describe as being “rambunctious.” But it’s so much better and more expressive. I say “rambunctious” aloud and it just kind of sits there in the air. I say “rumbustious” and I almost feel the clamor and tumult. It “busts” off from the tongue—fueled by intoxicating thoughts of rum, perhaps. I love this word. I will use this word. Thank you, Britain! And please, Clive and Karen, let me know if you ever use it. I like to think you do. Perhaps sometimes to describe unruly Americans who are being entirely too loud or otherwise obnoxious at one of your medieval cathedrals or historic sites?

The last thing I want to write about today is Lynn’s and my upcoming vacation—which also, in a way, brings Clive and Karen Scorer to mind. Again, Lynn and I met them when we were on vacation—or holiday, as they’d have it—in Iceland. And that destination was a perfect example of what Lynn and I like in a vacation venue: cold and under-populated. We like a nip in the air, hills on the horizon, lonely villages down the road. We’ve also traveled in Canada several times, and to National Parks out West in autumn—once the families are gone and the heat has diminished. Not that it was cold when we were in Iceland in July—it was light 24 hours a day, for one thing—but it wasn’t hot, either. Under-populated? Check. The entire nation’s population is about half that of Washington, DC.

This fall, however, we’ll be taking a trip that’s quite atypical for us. Far from cold and under-populated, we’ll be vacationing somewhere tropical and popular with tourists. We’re going to Hawaii. Specifically, Maui. Everyone who hears this sighs dreamily on our behalf and says this is wonderful news. It makes me feel pretty lame, however. Like I’ve sold out and gone mainstream. Like I might just as well get myself several tattoos and a Twitter handle while I’m at it, and buy stick-figure decals of a man, a woman, a cat and a dog to slap on the car.

But ah, there is method in our madness of normalcy. You may or may not recall that I have this desire to run in all 50 states. Not run a race, and certainly not run a marathon or triathlon in every state, like some really driven people aspire to do. No, just run for at least one uninterrupted hour in each of the 50 US states. On that same New England trip last fall when we met Clive and Karen on Cape Cod, Lynn indulged our driving us to Vermont and New Hampshire specifically so that I could cross the last two Atlantic seaboard states off of my running list. That made my state total 32. I am 55 years old. Most of my remaining states are very far from my home in Maryland, and none is farther than Hawaii.

I’d long figured that Hawaii would be one of my last running states, given the distance and expense, and that I’d arrive alone, spend just enough time there to do what I came to do, and fly home. Lynn will fly if she must, but she doesn’t like it. It scares her. Even now, a century into air travel, the idea of heavy machinery somehow defying gravity for hours at a time continues to strike her as a hugely counterintuitive recipe for disaster. Lynn also is prone to nightmares that involve drowning, and there’s an awful lot of water between the West Coast and the Hawaiian islands.

Lynn stunned me, however, a couple of months ago by proposing that we fly to Maui. She wanted me to be able to cross Hawaii off my list, she didn’t want me to have to go alone, and she’d discovered that a renowned Reiki master was going to be giving a two-day class on Maui in the fall. The Reiki opportunity would be her personal inducement to throw caution to the Pacific winds and jet high above a couple of thousand miles of ocean.

So, that’s where we’re going. Not kicking and screaming, exactly. We’re sure Maui is as beautiful as people say it is, and that we’ll have fun there. We’re not even ruling out that the trip could prove to be memorable. But it’s so not our kind of vacation, and the more people ooh and ahh over the word Maui when I share our destination, the more I wish we instead were going to one of my original options for this fall’s vacation, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, or, better yet, Manitoba. (America says Waikiki, I say Winnipeg.)

At any rate, one thing’s for damn sure: Even if the improbable happens, and I return from our island vacation with a newfound appreciation for loud, flowery shirts and ukulele music, you will never pull up behind my car at a traffic light and read on my bumper, “I Heart Hawaii.”

i Am In

On my bulletin board at work is one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. It’s a crude drawing of a middle-aged man sitting alone in his living room. He’s on the phone. The caption reads, “Just sitting here waiting for Facebook to go away.”

I’d say that guy is me, except that the caption is too short. Were I in a New Yorker cartoon, my caption would read, “Just sitting here waiting for Facebook, Twitter, and a world in which everyone is interacting with his or her phone every damn second to go away. And frankly, I’d rather not be on the phone right now, even to convey this cartoon punch line.”

Such a caption would be way too long for the New Yorker’s taste, of course, and far too cranky. Rather than simply critiquing, in a succinct and amusing way, one discrete aspect of our self-absorbed culture, my caption would pointedly indict the vast majority of the New Yorker’s readers. Who, like most everyone else today, might rather lose their food supply than their phone service. Still, my caption, wordy and dyspeptic as it might be, accurately summarizes my views.

But I recognize that Facebook, Twitter and society’s demand to be connected by technology all the time aren’t going away. As I had noted in my May 24 post, “Glass Too Full,” I know that I haven’t seen the half of it yet, or even the sixteenth. The “augmented reality” of Google Glass spectacles is just down the pike, on the road to embedded computer chips in our noggins and God knows what else. The ship headed at breakneck speed away from the quiet shores of my youth hasn’t just sailed. It has capsized, and been replaced by a virtual luxury liner that serves up a 24-hour buffet of instant gratification and dazzling cacophony. There’s no going back.  And resistance—total resistance, at least—is futile, and even counterproductive in some ways. Unless, that is, you’re already in your 80s, like my steadfastly Luddite parents, and keeping the damn kids off your lawn for just a few more years is do-able.

But I only just turned 55. Which feels plenty old to me, especially in view of last week’s optical check-up, the print summary of which reads like a catalog of decrepitude: “Today’s visit diagnoses: incipient cataract, myopia, astigmatism, presbyopia (age-related vision difficulty).” The thirty-something optometrist assured me that it’s all perfectly normal, to be expected. As if that was good news. Anyway, while 55 clearly ain’t young (and yes, I still can see clearly—with glasses, of course), it’s more likely than not that I’ve got at least a couple more decades on this planet. So, as I outlined in that May blog post, I had determined by that time—for reasons of practicality and of peace of mind, given my technophobia—that I needed finally to enter the 21st century, and get a smartphone.

Lynn did the research, in her role as the consumer reporter of our union, and last Sunday found us at our neighborhood Verizon Wireless store, where an extremely patient young man spent the first hour and 45 minutes of his work day setting up our iPhones and showing us some basics (most of which we’d forgotten by the end of our five-minute walk back to the house). We were a bit shell-shocked by the expense—both upfront and in perpetuity—of our passports to 24/7 interconnectivity. I asked Lynn, rhetorically, how people less financially secure than we can possibly afford monthly cell phone bills on top of their mortgage or rent, utility costs, food bills, and all the other expenses of modern life. She answered—resignedly but not inaccurately—“They can’t. That’s why everyone’s in debt.”

The reason cost loomed so large in my mind was because I knew Lynn had consented to the iPhones, which she gladly could have done without (unlike me, she already had a “dumb” cell phone), because this was a place I felt I needed to go. And I immediately wondered if I’d ever use my iPhone enough to justify the expense. I really do hate talking on the phone, after all. I don’t feature downloading a ton of apps. Given my deep antipathy for people constantly texting in public, how likely am I to do much of that?

Now, as I type these words—on my home computer, to be sure, and certainly not on my phone, if one even can even type a Word document on a phone—it’s five days later. What have I learned, and how am I feeling about the whole thing at this point? It’s a bit complicated.

I have exchanged texts with several people—unexpectedly popping up on their phones, joking that, as unlikely as it might seem given this week’s horrid heat and humidity up and down the Atlantic Seaboard, hell has in fact frozen over. Their responses have been along the lines of “WTF?!”—underlining, clearly, the must-(not)-read status of this blog—with my friend Elaine memorably demanding to know, in her reply, “What is this sorcery?!” I must concede that it’s been pretty fun, and also good for my self-esteem. When, yesterday, after a lunchtime tutorial from my tech-whiz friend Jason, I succeeded not only in taking a photo of the cheesy battle that every day is waged atop my office bookcase between Godzilla and Gammera the Flying Turtle, but also in embedding that photo within a text message that I then sent, I felt as if I’d just graduated from MIT.

On the other hand, though, there’s this: One thing that I’ve sort of liked, personally, about texting in these early days is concurrently what I greatly dislike about it in a global sense. In a number of cases, when I first texted someone, I heard back from that person immediately. Take my friend Lara, for example, who by her own admission seldom checks her e-mail, and who always lets incoming phone calls go to voicemail. I’d last heard from her sometime during the first Obama administration, or so it seemed, yet she had responded to my text message almost before I was sure it had been sent. So, I quickly witnessed texting’s potential to reach the otherwise unreachable. And beyond that, sure, when you have an urgent question for someone, or when you just want quick confirmation that he or she was charmed by your idiotic Godzillla photo, it’s great to get an immediate response.

Getting a split-second response also, though, confirms my worst fear. Which is that pretty much everyone in the world anymore is all but surgically attached to his or her phone, and might feel actual physical withdrawal were it to be out of his or her sight for a solitary second. Which, to me, is incredibly depressing. Checking for messages fairly regularly is one thing, having a Pavlovian response to each and every ring, chime or vibration quite another.

Per my preexisting aversion, I’ve thus far initiated no calls on my phone and have received only one—from Jason, and it echoed, because he was sitting a couple of feet away from me in my office at the time. But I can see where having a mobile phone will come in handy from time to time. Like, for instance, if I’m standing at the side of the road and I see a driver distractedly yakking away on his or her hand-held device, which is illegal in all local jurisdictions. In that event, I may well wish to alert the authorities.

I guess phones are good for emergencies, too.

I haven’t done any e-mailing by phone yet, but that will be advantageous on occasion. In a major breakthrough this morning, at Starbucks after my run, I successfully accessed my office e-mail on my iPhone. Someone I plan to interview for an article had proposed a few possible times, and I could have confirmed one of them via my phone. In that instance, however, it was easier to just wait until I got home, and to type out a leisurely reply on a full-sized computer keyboard, as opposed to laboriously composing a clipped response on my small phone screen.

I have read a few newspaper stories and headlines on my phone, though I find it a constricted and largely unpleasant viewing experience. But there will be times, I’m sure, when I’ll appreciate the convenience of overhearing people talking about the latest overnight scandal or calamity or international contretemps and being able to immediately get the journalistic details. Let’s face it, too: Given my aforementioned age and the surety of diminishing memory, there will be times when I simply must Google the dreadfully important name of that sitcom actor or song title that lies just outside my cerebral cortex.

What else do people do with their phones? Oh, right—they download and use all manner of apps. I haven’t done any of that yet. I already can think of many apps in which I have no interest, such as paying for coffee with my phone, or mapping my runs. I prefer to keep track of my expenses by using cash whenever it’s practical. And the way I map my runs is by deciding if I like the scenery on that street, or if I’m really in the mood to climb yonder hill. I can, however, think of at least one app I probably will want to download: the Major League Baseball scoreboard app. At least if my historically woebegone team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, continues its improbable run of success. (Apps can easily be deleted, right?)

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m glad, by and large, that I’ve taken this step. And it seems likely I’ll feel even better about it once I know how to do a few more things. I already feel less stupid and less obstinately self-segregated from the mainstream of American life, which is all to the good. But it’s very much an open question whether the true believers who have exclaimed, “You’ll love it! You’ll get to the point where you can’t imagine you ever lived without it!” will be proven right. I frankly can’t see ever shaking the conviction that much has been lost in our light-speed rush away from a pace of life and degree of contentedness that seemed to serve the human race quite well for a very long time—until, that is, we bought into the idea that faster, without fail, is better.

I not only can imagine that I—that we—ever lived without what communication technology has wrought, but I happily, wistfully, daydream about those days.

Jackpot

I was thrilled recently to discover that Bertha plays the lottery.

Bertha is the woman who empties my trash can at around 5:15 every weekday afternoon. That’s not all she is, of course. She may be a poet, a painter, an inventor on the side. She might have been an office worker like me in her native country, for all I know, not that there’s any shame in being a member of a cleaning crew. She could well be a wife and mother, and/or the glue that holds together an extended family that spans continents. But Bertha and I have a circumscribed context and a limited vocabulary. Her English is slow and uncertain, but it still trumps my Spanish.

Bertha is tall and sturdy, with frizzy hair that usually is tied back. Her predecessor was short and squat, and scared me. I never knew that other woman’s name, but I sensed her visceral loathing of me. I might have been making it up, because I tend to project onto cleaning-crew staff the distaste I imagine I would have for the likes of me, were I an immigrant working in a similarly crappy-paying job. Were I forced daily to empty the trash can of a monolingual dweeb whose windowsill is lined with an assortment of dust-catching tchotchkes—a ballplayer bobblehead, a Charlie Brown Pez dispenser, two hockey pucks, assorted seashells, etc—that bespeak a life of undeserved privilege and suggest the owner is deeply smitten with his own quirkiness.

But I really do think that woman hated me. I always imagined her rolling her eyes with disgust, like Grammy Hall did at Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall—seeing me not as a dreadlocked Orthodox rabbi, but as some sort of Brahmin who no doubt stirred his tea with a silver spoon that was stashed in one of his desk drawers. Her English was the equal of my Spanish. I would say “Gracias” as she returned my emptied trash can to its place against the wall, but the word always sounded pandering to me. She’d answer “De nada” in a tone that suggested she’d think de nada of stuffing my lanky ass into that receptacle and hurling me into a compactor.

It got to where I transparently fled the scene whenever I heard her cart working its way up the hall. Or else, sometimes I’d close my office door, as if to suggest I was busily teleconferencing in there, or perhaps putting the finishing touches on that troublesome Anderson Account. I doubt she was fooled. And so my trash would accumulate for another day. But that was better than getting the stink eye.

Then, one day, this taller, frizzy-haired woman appeared in the frightening woman’s stead. She wasn’t exactly whistling while she worked, but neither did I sense any animus. Just weariness, as if this new person might be on the third job of a 16-hour workday. She had some grasp of English, and no discernible opinion about my guts. I felt great relief. This moved me to make an effort to get on her good side, or at least to cement my standing on her noncommittal side. If I didn’t act fast, I feared, she soon would take note of the Godzilla and Gamera action figures waging war atop my bookcase and bitterly conclude, “So, this is how the juvenile gringo spends his money while I am killing myself to support a family of 10.”

I made it a point not only to say hello to her when she reached my door each day, and to thank her once she’d emptied my trash can, but to reference things like the weather, the weekend, an upcoming holiday. One afternoon she was wearing her hair down, and I told her it looked pretty. (It did.) She seemed to accept my sincerity, and smiled.

Then, one day, I introduced myself. This was when she told me her name was Bertha. I’m terrible at remembering names, so I repeated it aloud. I pronounced the “h,” but then I doubted myself. “Wait,” I said. “Bertha or Berta? How do you spell it?” As it happened, I was asking two different questions. Yes, B-E-R-T-H-A. But the “h” is silent—“the Spanish way,” she explained.

She said she has a brother named Eric, except with a “k.” My parents, I noted, had considered that spelling for me. That afternoon, Bertha and I wished each other a good evening by name.

I really should’ve taken advantage of that slight momentum and asked her, in the ensuing days, more about her family. I could’ve introduced the subject, after all, by pointing to the photos on my bookshelf of my wife, cat and dog. But somehow I didn’t do that. Some days Bertha seemed to be in a hurry. Other days I was feeling distracted by e-mails or other work that I wanted to finish before heading home. Also, I frankly worried about being a bother. I tried to put myself in her place, and could imagine her thinking, “Really? Must we make conversation in a language that’s a struggle for me? I don’t even know you.  ‘Hello’ would suffice. And anyway, my family is none of your business.’”

Sure, I was reading a lot into the situation, but the class/cultural gulf inherent in the cleaner-cleanee relationship makes me sufficiently uncomfortable that I’ve always filled in my own blanks with worst-case projections. (Per the stink-eye woman.)  The upshot was that even though Bertha and I now knew each other’s names, I felt that our relationship had reached an impasse. It wasn’t growing. Our minute or two together each afternoon seemed increasingly awkward to me, sometimes even painful. I started wondering if Bertha dreaded my opening my mouth. I sometimes dreaded opening it. Occasionally I hid in the bathroom, just as I’d done with the scary cleaning lady.

But then, one day a couple of weeks ago, something utterly unexpected and wonderful happened.

I’d walked down the street to buy lottery tickets at this weird Filipino-run package-shipping store that also sells everything from Washington Redskins paraphernalia to old movie posters and foam “We’re Number One” fingers. I like the guys who work there because they’re super-patient with senior citizens, always wish me luck after my millionth consecutive losing week, and bring their little kids to work (who often can be heard breaking things in the back room). On this particular day I’d exchanged waves with one of the guys when I walked in. Then he’d resumed entering into his lottery machine the numbers that the woman in front of me had given him.

Suddenly I realized that the other lottery hopeful was Bertha. I called her name and waved my own filled-in entry cards for Powerball and MegaMillions. “My retirement plan,” I explained, wondering if she’d get the joke. She laughed and said, “Me, too!”

When I saw her back at the office a few hours later we commiserated, as best we linguistically could, about our maddening lack of success at Getting Rich Quick despite both of us clearly playing the best numbers week after week.

 

On subsequent days, we’ve discussed how often we buy  tickets (weekend drawings for me, weekends and midweek for her), and our desire for a life-changing score—none of this penny-ante $100 scratch-off nonsense for us.

That single chance encounter (no pun intended) has invigorated our micro-relationship. Even if our shared goal of one day residing on Easy Street isn’t explicitly mentioned every day at 5:15, it’s there in the background—suggesting that she and I aren’t so different after all, that Lady Luck truly is the great equalizer, and that, if there really is a silver spoon in my desk drawer, the silver ain’t real.

So, OK, that’s my take. Bertha may not be blogging about a life lesson we learned at the lottery outlet. What I do know, though, is that I feel less self-conscious around her now, that I’m no longer fleeing to the bathroom, and that I’m enthusiastically stockpiling conversational fodder: Our favorite lottery game. Why the winners always are from, like, Iowa. Annual annuity or lump payment? What we’ll do with the loot the day our ship—make that luxury liner—finally comes in.

The timing seems right, too, to tell Bertha about my family and to ask her about hers. I mean, this won’t just be our retirement nest egg when he hit the big money, right? The day the lottery gods smile on us, we’ll surely be spreading our MegaMillions around.