"How interesting."

I pulled all the winter bedclothes out yesterday and took them down to the laundromat; it'd take a week to get them done at home. I don't know how a laundromat survives in these parts; most people have washers. 8-11:30 on a Saturday morning, and I saw 4 other people there--two of them just dropping stuff off to be washed by the old lady who runs the place. Must be a write-off.

There was an older man there. I took him for homeless at first; skinny and bent, wearing those green factory pants held up at the waist with a rope, and an old flannel shirt, and he smelled musty. You don't see a lot of rope belts around here. I'd finished my copy of Harper's and walked over to drop it on the table for anyone else who wanted to read it. "Hooray!" said the guy. "Reading material!" And he grinned and snatched it up. First time I noticed him from the neck up: blue beret, snow-white hair and beard--very clean, very combed--and a pink, unlined face with sharp blue eyes. He looked interesting. Half an hour later he wandered over and started chatting.

Turns out he's an organic farmer. (I didn't know we had farmers living in southwest Connecticut.) He lives the principles, and can (and did) go on for quite some time about herbal and intravenous cleansing processes, the benefits of raw food diets, the location of key practitioners in the natural healing community. My mother would've loved him; she's an expert in her own right. She also--unlike me--loves this kind of chance encounter with the non-typical. (The non-typical notwithstanding, I'm just not very social.) I took her with me on a cross-country drive once, and she spotted a Native American wearing full headdress at a Holiday Inn restaurant across the river from Louisville. She sped right up to him--complimenting him on his jewelry, and then chatting for half an hour. I was put off by the headdress--sorry, but it's true; I much prefer to experience strangers who don't wear an identity position on their t-shirts. Or heads. How is a headdress relevant at a Holiday Inn across the river from Louisville? I walked off and waited for her in the car. In Nevada she did the same thing with the local sheriff, and then made me take a photo of the two of them. As I look at the photo now I notice that she looked positively lit up with this big, authentic grin, and the sheriff's all puff-chested and happy--and if you ask her about it now she can tell you things about the town that she learned talking up the sheriff. Interesting things. All I took away from the moment was annoyance. I don't even remember the town: only the photo.

Tom, the organic farmer, moved on to talk about sustainable living, global warming, the lure of the marketplace, etc. And I drifted off in my mind, and thought of a man I met once who lived on a little family farm way upstate and named his boy Bear (and their last name was Wolf). Baby Bear Wolf. I thought how the Wolfs didn't need to tell me why they lived the way they did: they just lived it, and you could come and visit, and take it or leave it. Whatever, with a smile. Not my kind of life, but definitely my kind of people.