“You scare me,” the woman said. “Not in the creeper-weirdo sense of being scared, but like if I was in a foreign country. Maybe dangerous? I don’t know. And I didn’t speak the language and I was giddy and excited to be somewhere new but still, there is that fear of the unknown. Anxiety really. Like I’m going to learn something I don’t know, but I’m also going to miss a lot of it because I don’t understand it completely.”

The lady was at the bar with her friend and had shocked me by mentioning that she read my articles, and this after I’d already served them drinks. I usually settle into my anonymity at the bar, and I like it, and sometimes I’m thrown for a loop when someone brings one of my other lives into it and my worlds collide.

A man a few stools away swirls his brown liquor with the big block of ice and shakes his head.

“I don’t want to be learning anything. Not like that. I don’t read and I know that is heresy, but I just don’t. I don’t want to stick my head into new worlds or stick new worlds into my head, either. I try to read, but I just can’t get past the first few paragraphs – it doesn’t really matter what it is or how good it is – I’m falling asleep or just bored. I think I’ve been affected by the internet world, and I just can’t read anymore.”

The woman dismisses the man with a half-wave. “Anyway… I like to think, and you make me think, but still, I’m a little scared.”

“What makes you scared?”

“Ok. So, right now, you’re thinking and writing in your head.”

“Ok.”

“When I read you, it is like you are walking around and noticing things and thinking, but nobody knows that. They just see you there. And right now, you’re thinking and writing and there is for me that foreign country feeling I get that there is a lot going on that I’m never going to know.”

“Sometimes I’m just tending bar.”

“I do that when I fish,” the man says. “I just fish. I’m not thinking about anything.”

I start drying a glass because that’s what you do in vignettes like this. “I used to watch a reality show,” I say. “Doesn’t matter which one. And they were in Europe… Italy I think, and they dropped these contestants off in a strange town and they had a list of ingredients. First, they had to go door to door to get the ingredients, then they had to talk someone into letting them come inside and make a pizza or something. It was a cool thing to see these people let them come in and make a pizza… but the locals weren’t prepared for company. They were just being hospitable. You got to see how they were just living their lives. That was cool.”

“That would be cool,” the woman said.

“I’ve been overseas,” I said, “and I’ve been walking around in a foreign country looking at the houses and the neighborhoods and I’ve wondered if it was all a set. You know? Set up just for me. Like a Potemkin Village or a Hollywood movie set. The Truman Show. I wanted to go up to a house and knock and say “Hey, let me in. I want to see if this is real.”

“That’s weird,” the man says. He points at his glass and I pour him more of the brown liquid.

I shrug. “I think it was probably better traveling in the 50s. Or further back. Between the wars. Before the whole world set itself up for tourism. Back then if you were hiking through Greece or Germany, you would just stop at someone’s house and they would bring you in and feed you and maybe you have a few beers before you go walking again. Now, everything is tourism.”

“I like it now. Hotels and comforts. Screw that other business – just walking around going into strangers’ houses.”

The woman twists her glass on the napkin. “What are you writing next?”

“We’ll see.”

“I like this idea of someone writing about just interacting with locals,” she said. “Hemingway did that and you don’t get much of that anymore. Almost never. You ever going to do anything like that?”

“Maybe.”

“You should.”

“Sometimes I’m just tending bar.”

***

Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.