Missed Connections

Recently, we've become fascinated by the Missed Connections section of Craig's List, in which people write addressing people with whom they'd had chance encounters in restaurants, or made eye contact with on the bus. I wrote a series about such encounters this morning.

7:43 AM
Saw you on the 3 bus yesterday. You were wearing a green jacket, the green was the color of elm leaves in full sunlight. One sleeve was rolled up almost to your elbow, and your forearm pushed a little against the fold. You took the jacket off, and your arm moved slowly and elegantly, as if its own separate being. Would you like to talk sometime?

8:24 AM
I was on the 3 yesterday in a green jacket that I did indeed remove. It was hot on the bus, and I steadily felt myself becoming foggy with the temperature, as if the feeling of being overheated could conceal and muffle other happenings of my life, the way cloud cover does on a bay. Have you ever been to the ocean? Were you the man in the red hat across the aisle?

9:11 AM
I am not the man with the red hat, although I recall him too, now that you mention it. I don’t wear hats, I’ve never liked them. I once had a tightly knit cap that my aunt made for me. It had an itchy stretch and pulled slightly upwards when I wore it, in part because it was too tight and in part because of the massive pom pom she had sewed on the top. I always had to wear it in cold weather, no excuses my mother said, although I thought of many: it was too unique for daily wearl, it was too artfully stitched, it pulled at my ears and might eventually pull them off, hairs of mine that found their way into the wiry knitting were inevitably pulled out. And as I ran on the playground with my friends, the pom pom flopped back and forth, counting the moments until a hole would appear, and the hat would be set aside. I am the man who was holding lilac clippings in his hand. I have never been to the ocean. You got off at Spooner and Monroe. Where were you going?

9:35 AM
I was going to the grocery store to buy eggs. I was once presented with a single egg from the grandmother of a friend. She talked little, but when we were putting on our coats she approached me and placed a large, white egg in my palm. I cupped it in both hands as we walked to the driveway, as we rode home in the car. Out of sight, it grew warm, and somehow the slightness of its shell became more apparent. Yesterday, I awoke from a dream in which she had placed another egg in my hand, a fuchsia one dappled with deeply pigmented spots. Awake, I checked the refrigerator but was out of eggs. I closed my eyes, and recalled making a fritata for a dinner party, and cracking forty eggs into a large metal bowl for whisking. Each yolk fell, vibrantly whole, into its own clear gel. So I got on the 3, and eventually bought four cartons of eggs, a little bit of thyme, a sprig of fresh basil. But in truth, now that they are in my fridge I am reluctant to recreate this memory. Today I fried two eggs and ate them with toast and cheese, the favorite breakfast of a former lover of mine. It was too heavy, in the end. Where did you get off?

9:57 AM
Have you ever seen the shells of ostrich eggs? A woman sells them at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings, and the eggs themselves are weighty and tan, somehow more reminiscent of the developing bird that would have been inside them. The woman keeps a basket full of pieces of the shell on her table. They are like mosaic tiles, thick, and white along their broken rims. Anyone who likes may keep a piece, but I never take one. I got off way on the west side of town, at a strip mall near a lone ice cream shop that stands on a patch of dry ground away from the other shopping stretches. There’s an Iron Skillet nearby, I often went there as a teenager for black coffee and hash browns, with friends or alone. One woman has been working there for at least half a decade now, and she has never showed me any signs of recognition, although she must know me at this point. The other day, I felt as I sometimes do after a few weeks without black coffee and hash browns, and I clipped some lilacs for her from the bush behind my house and got on the bus. They’d already started to wilt slightly, as if they are made of muscles that have tired from weeks of blooming. The bus ride didn’t help. I watched you take off your jacket and crack each finger on each hand, a gesture I’ve never been able to bring myself to do but I admire every time I see someone else doing it. It indicates, I think, such a trust in one's own body, that something won’t just snap, that all of your joints won’t be whittled away years later. I watched you, and I thought, that is some lady. And the woman at the Iron Skillet, she is some lady too. I arrived on the West Side, stepped out of the bus, and crossed the four lane road to the strip mall. Inside the air conditioning was on, and the room tasted so dry it was almost chalky. All the booths were empty, and I sat in one by the window, where I could imagine the heat leaking through the glass. I ordered black coffee and hash browns and made a tower out of the creamer and jam packets while I waited. My food came, I ate. I left the bouquet of lilacs with my pay and tip. I looked for her through the window once I’d left, to see her reaction to the flowers, but couldn’t see in because of the glare. I wanted to tell her, Do you realize how long ago the potato first left its origins in the Andes, and do you know how unpopularly it was received by Europeans? Do you know that Marie Antoinette wore potato flowers in her hair to try to make it palateable to the French, because of it was cheap, nutritious, and calorically dense, and because the King realized that famine would contribute to their eventual downfall and death? That he placed his guards on the lawn to guard plantings of potatos, and strategically let them off early so that people would steal them out of the yard? That one can live indefinitely on potatoes and milk? That you can do whatever you like with these lilacs, you can wear them in your hair? By which I would have meant, People all over the world have been interacting for a long, long time, yet I have never found it in myself to leave the Midwest, and I don’t know if I want to.

You can check out Missed Connections for the Madison area here: http://madison.craigslist.org/mis/

You can read more about the history of the potato, as well as the histories of human relationships with the apple, the tulip, and marijuana, in Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/conversation/jan-june01/botany_06-29.html