You Are Special

“Nobody wants to work, and you can’t get any help,” I said to Sue, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

It’s become my jokey motto about labor shortages, something I imagine every inconvenienced person-of-a-certain-age crying when a restaurant or retail store can’t indulge his or her impulses. My grandmother has been fond of invoking it when we’ve talked on the phone recently, not that she wants to understand an explanation of why it keeps occurring. While Sue and I split a grilled corn muffin and discussed the faded Save Ferris tee shirt an employee was wearing at a local cafè we dig, a smiling elderly couple sat at the table beside us.

“Oh, that’s my mom and dad,” Cathie, the owner, said in a semi-exasperated tone, periodically rushing around the rustic room while cupcakes and cookies baked in her ovens.

“We’ve been talking to your dad,” I told her. “He’s a riot.”

“My mom might disagree,” she replied.

Her dad, who had just finished a bowl of the soup du jour, said he’s usually pro-BYOF—the F for Food—because his daughter refused to eat dinners he cooked while she was growing up. I patted him on the back as his beaming wife introduced herself.

“We love this place!” Sue, always eager to interact with the elderly, told Cathie’s mom. “Your daughter is an amazing person.”

“Oh, we know,” her mom said in a satisfied, but not smug, tone. “Thank you.”

As we exited a store later in the afternoon, a solitary hot air balloon drifted through a gray sky, its tiny flame fueling astonishment.

“HOLY SHIT!” Sue exclaimed. “DO YOU SEE THAT?”

“Have you never seen a hot air balloon before?!”

“NO! YOU HAVE?” Before letting me answer, she blurted out, “THAT’S SO FUCKING COOL! HOW DOES IT STAY UP IN THE AIR?!”

“Something to do with buoyancy. I’m not a scientist. How have you never seen one in person?”

“I dunno. WE SHOULD GO ON A RIDE! DO YOU THINK THERE’S A PLACE WE COULD DO IT AROUND HERE?”

“Well, yeah, given there’s a hot air balloon in the sky above us.”

“Would we be able to fly it?”

“I’m guessing there would be a guide or whatever they call hot air balloon pilots.”

Once the rush wore off—Sue’s childlike sense of wonder fades quicker than one might expect—we detoured to a new topic: the trucking industry.

“I was reading an article about how the next generations don’t want to do that job,” Sue told me. “Yet everything we buy comes off a truck.”

“Right. Nobody shops at the Target inside Bradley Airport.”

“Maybe you could become a truck driver, Blebbz. Bang some hookers…”

“Start smoking three packs a day, do meth, experience kidney failure before I’m fifty.”

As a day of bargain hunting neared its terminus, we stopped at a shared pleasure palace: the Holyoke Mall. On the hunt for a copy of a used DVD, I found it for four bucks and ambled to the register where I overheard a thin, short-haired guy mentioning to his co-worker, “…and they tell you that you are special.”

Forever on the prowl for thrills, I looked at them and said, “You both are special!”

Our cashier, who I later told Sue “looked like a Jeff with a J,” explained that they were discussing how robots will be driving tractor trailers by the beginning of next decade. Saddened by the untimely death of my upcoming career as a crystal-snorting road hog, he detailed the looming A.I. takeover.

“What if my daughter says she wants to be a radiologist?” Maybe-Jeff rhetorically asked us. “I’ll have to tell her, ‘No, hunny, that’s a robot’s job.’”

“I don’t think it’s gonna happen as quickly as you think,” I told him.

“Oh, it’s coming!”

Sue mentioned how we’d been talking about driverless trucks earlier, which ignited some mixed feelings in Maybe-Jeff.

“People get a big part of their identity from their jobs. What if the government gave everyone a million-dollar check on January 1st instead? How would they have an identity?”

“By getting a neck tattoo,” I said in jest. Maybe-Jeff chuckled at the unfortunate reality of my statement, but jokes weren’t what he was chasing.

“Most people would rush out to buy expensive things because they don’t know how to be still. They need stimulus like cigarettes or alcohol or their cheeseburgers. What would we do without work? What would you do?”

“I’d write. All I need is a pad and a pen or a laptop and I’m good to go. But I know what you mean. What about you?”

“There’s a thing in Buddhism about being still. Give me a bowl of food and my guitar. I’d go for walks in the woods and play music.”

Maybe-Jeff alluded to how Covid isolation led to his re-evaluation of his place in the world, and while I’m not convinced that conversing with a couple like-minded strangers radically reinforced his perspective, it reminded me of a Zadie Smith quote I read recently and have pondered often since.

I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are and have all the same expectations and demands.

“Do you want a receipt?” Maybe-Jeff asked me.

“Of course,” I told him. “Gotta post it next to this Wedding Crashers DVD on Instagram later.”

Sarcasm will never need help as long as I’m working.

As Sue and I aimlessly patrolled the aisles of Christmas Tree Shops, ultimately realizing we were delaying our inevitable ride home, we discussed and hypothesized about Maybe-Jeff for twenty minutes. Did he have this conversation with his younger co-worker often? Was said co-worker happy we relieved him of Maybe-Jeff’s retail philosophizing? Would he play some Jack Johnson covers in between bites of nuts and berries beneath a dying oak or maple on his next day off? How long would it take for him to achieve the zen existence he coveted? Somehow, he felt realer than most strangers I’ve met since March 2020.

Before leaving Sue’s house, her poised to devour one of Cathie’s cupcakes, I brought a leaf-covered stroller to the end of the street for trash pick-up. As I walked back to the porch, I was startled by a tall, mute, presumably homeless man stumbling from curb to curb, unresponsive when I offered a hello.

“You are special,” I wanted to tell him. “You are also going to be murdered by a driverless truck.” 

Instead, I embraced Maybe-Jeff’s viewpoint and wished the man would simply be still.