Occasionally I like to depart from the hallowed halls of the Alderman Maps room to study somewhere more exposed and in tune with the real world, which does in fact exist outside the borders of U.Va. Last semester, as I sat in the Barnes and Noble at Barracks, happy to be surrounded by books and congratulating myself for breaking out of my college-student bubble, someone slid into the seat next to mine.
“Mind if I sit here?” he asked. He was an old man with wispy white hair and smiling eyes, holding a large coffee with the name “Otis” scrawled on the side of the cup. I didn’t mind at all. In fact, the enthusiasm I expressed struck me as a little bizarre: was I really so deprived of contact with the outside world that this old man asking to sit next to me could send me into a tailspin of doe-eyed amusement?
Furthermore, what did my excitement and admitted surprise say about how distant we’ve become as a society? Shouldn’t sitting next to strangers be a normal and regular occurrence, especially when one is venturing out into the world specifically with the hopes of interacting with others?
Bearing all this in mind, I was happy to launch into conversation with the old man. When he saw I was reading “The Grapes of Wrath” for an English class, Otis asked me if I was a student of literature. The question launched a 45-minute discussion on books, authors, language, literature and, surprisingly, wind machines. My new friend dominated the conversation, telling me that he himself was a student, professor and writer of literature. Short fiction, specifically.
“I wrote lots of stories,” he told me, grabbing the piece of paper I had been using as a bookmark and scribbling something on it. Otis focused on one story he had written in particular, entitled “Heary Weather,” which he said had been published in numerous journals and been dubbed “one of the best short stories in the English language.”
Admittedly, I questioned some of his tales — the timing didn’t quite add up, and I wasn’t convinced he had invented a wind machine like he claimed — but nevertheless I was overcome with excitement at the possibility that I was speaking to someone who was published and celebrated in underground writerly circles. At the end of the conversation, I asked Otis for his email and he told me to let him know when I had read “Heary Weather” because he was curious to know my thoughts.
Three minutes later, I was sitting in the parking lot, searching Otis by his full name, the school he attended, the story title and even the journal in which it has been published. Each channel was a dead-end.
Since then, after telling this story to friends and turning it over in my own head, and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. I’ll never know whether there was any legitimacy to Otis’s tale, but I was enthralled by everything he — a stranger, turned acquaintance, turned stranger again — had to say. As I left, I knew I had to do things like that more often. After all, I certainly gained more than I lost from the conversation.
If I had been at the Starbucks on the Corner as opposed to the more removed coffee shop at Barracks, I might never have had this experience. Would someone have dared sit down right next to me, a terrifyingly unknown stranger? Would we have even attempted to engage in a conversation which goes beyond asking how the other was doing and uncaringly replying we’re “good”?
There’s a whole world full of strangers. No matter how many people we meet, that much will always be true. But when given the opportunity, why do we so often deny the chance to talk to someone new? They may be compulsive liars, living in dream worlds or, if you’re lucky, authors of the most beautiful short story to ever be written in the English language. No matter their story, there’s surely something to be gained from making one less stranger out of the world.
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