A friend asked recently where I get ideas for these weekly writings, and the answer is they’re just out there happening all around us. If we keep our eyes and ears open, they come into view, but then the question is: What do we do with them?
A few examples come from an afternoon drive we took to Farmersville on Saturday. LeAnn and I were needing a brief escape from our daily routines and patterns, and we picked Farmersville because it’s only about 25 miles up Texas 78 from home. I’ve been meeting my buddy Ken there for lunch every month for the past few years, and while I’ve tried all the eateries, I’ve never visited any of the shops, so this was the day to go.
About halfway to our destination, we turned off the highway, following a “Produce Stand” sign I’ve been seeing for months. After several turns we came to a small house with a little wooden shed out front with sides propped open with two-by-fours. We saw some baskets of vegetables on tables, which was a good sign, but when we walked up to the shed there was nobody there. We looked around at the tomatoes, watermelons, squash and cucumbers and were joined shortly by a young man who had come over from the house. We asked a few questions and LeAnn decided we’d get some squash and cucumbers, and when she asked about okra that was listed on a sign but not in baskets, he said they had some back at the house and he’d go get us a basket full.
While the young man was away, a large pickup truck rolled up and a couple got out and looked around a moment. We told them the person running the stand would be right back, but apparently they didn’t see anything they wanted and left. When the young man came back, he was empty-handed but said someone else was picking fresh okra and would bring it to us soon.
We waited in the shade of the shed, but it was still very hot and a large fan was mostly just stirring up the hot air. The young man told us a little bit about the business and how vandals kept knocking down their signs out on the highway. He didn’t live on the property, but he said there was an old man in the house who was “kinda crazy” and had to be watched and taken care of. It was unclear who else was there, but after a while a woman came with a box full of freshly picked okra and they measured out a basket for us. We paid with cash and headed on up the road.
In Farmersville we wandered in and out of shops along the red brick streets in the old downtown area. While we were in one of the shops, the room came alive with the sound of Amber alerts going off on all the cell phones in pockets and purses. I looked and it was a potential child abduction in San Antonio, and when the alert sounded again a little while later, the clerk sighed and said, “They just won’t go away.” My unspoken reply was, “At least not until we quit hurting each other.”
At another shop, we saw the couple that had come and gone quickly from the produce stand. When the man saw us, he said, “Looks like you’re following us,” and I said, “No, we were at the produce stand before you, so I think it’s the other way around.”
I thought that might raise a chuckle, but it didn’t. Instead, he and his wife proceeded to tell us how there was nothing at the stand they needed and it all looked store-bought anyway. “You can tell it’s not grown there when you don’t see any gardens,” she said. We told them they had gone to pick okra behind the house and had come back with fresh pods, but they weren’t convinced. I didn’t tell them we’ve grown okra and could see tall, leafy plants peeking out from behind the house. I just let it go.
When the stores had all closed for the evening, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner. After we ordered but before our meal arrived, our waitress came to the table with a slice of pecan pie because her manager had told her one of her tables had ordered it. It looked good but it wasn’t ours, and she sighed and said, “I thought I was going crazy because I only have two tables and I sure don’t recall anyone ordering it.” We told her she wasn’t crazy and hoped the rest of her evening would go better.
I don’t know if there are any lessons to draw from any of this or dots to connect, except to say that no matter where you go, there are people with issues: skepticism and doubt, exhaustion from chaos and bad news, and frustration from working hard and being second-guessed by those in charge.
Sometimes the doubt is about whether the okra is fresh, and sometimes it’s about something much more profound. The bad news might be far away on social media, or it might be knocking on your own door. The frustration might be over the little daily details of a job, or a lifetime of setbacks and disappointments. We just never know what the people we encounter have experienced or are going through right this moment.
The young man at the produce stand said the old man in the house had good days of clarity and bad days of confusion, but he’d managed to find a little bit of humor and irony in his condition. According to our host, sometimes when asked a question, the old man will say, “You should have asked me two minutes ago because I’ve already forgotten the answer.”
Perhaps there’s a blessing in forgetting some things. There’s definitely a blessing in knowing when to make a fuss and when to just let something go.