Life is strange, everyday can be odd, or dull, or sharp, or obtuse. It turns on small individual occurrences. It’s impossible to predict where it will turn, which direction it will go. There are times it changes so quickly, impetuously you don’t know how it happened, other times it gets stuck in rut, grinding people to dust.
In the business where I work many people had iPods, there were a few iPads, and a sprinkling of Macs. The company hired a new IT person, and he wasn’t a fan of Apple products, vociferously so. People started drifting away from the reliable little devices. When the smart phone pandemic swept the company employees rushed to buy Android devices. Nobody will admit to being influenced by group thinking but it wasn’t a spontaneous combustion caused by Google propaganda, or a sudden failure of iPhones, it was a desire to fit in. Everybody found a reason not to buy an iPhone, and they were all irrelevant. There is nothing more natural than wanting to be a part of a congregation, something larger. Banding together was probably how mankind survived so long.
It was a small thing and Apple seems to be doing fine. But it was shocking how easily a building full of people were so easily influenced. How quickly they assumed they had been mistaken, and so many other people were wrong.
Once, several years ago, we were driving the back roads of West Virginia and ran across a small diner. It was a short, square building painted what might have been a cheerful, bright blue but had faded to a drab, washed out aqua color. It was built with concrete blocks, there was only one door and two small windows, giving it a hostile, penal look. It was the only place we’d seen so we pulled into the gravel lot and made our way inside, past the lonely, faded, chipped plastic for sale sign. Inside it was dark, warm and humid, obviously it was being cooled by an evaporation cooler. But the dark was welcoming, and it was more comfortable than the steamy July day outside.
We ordered our food, hamburgers, canned sodas and French fries. The waitress, who was also the cook, was the owner. She made our food and bought it to us in little wax paper lined baskets. Since it was mid-afternoon, we were the only customers and she sat at a table close to us and made small talk.
Eventually, when talk became silence and the void became uncomfortable, we asked how long her place had been for sale.
“Four years.” She told us. “Not one serious offer. Nobody wants to work this hard for this kind of money.”
Looking at her it was obvious that life had taken its toll. In the dimly lit room, it was impossible to tell how old she was, she could have been ancient, or she could have been our age, which isn’t young, but isn’t ancient either.
She wanted to get out of the grinding, demanding grist wheel of owning a diner in a small town. But she couldn’t afford to just walk away, she was chained to the place, indentured to a bank that had provided the money to open the business. I’ve always wanted to go back and see if she ever made it out. But I don’t even remember what town we were in, or what road it was on. Besides, I might not like the answer.
Life doesn’t always follow a path; sometimes it burns through a building leaving everybody gasping for breath and wondering what happened. Other times it can lock a person into an identity, handcuffed to a long-forgotten fantasy, making them pay for dreaming of independence. We are all characters in a giant comic tragedy, and sometimes you want to laugh, and sometimes you want to cry, but you will probably never be able to understand what happened.
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