She got off the treadmill, started walking toward me, looked me in the eye, and said, “Hi, how are you doing?”

I didn’t think I knew her, although I’m the guy who had to be introduced to his own relatives at his wedding, so you can never count on me to remember anyone. The important thing was that she remembered me, so I responded that I was doing quite well. Then, I began asking her about her day as she walked past me and out the door.

Damned ear buds.

If there’s ever going to be justice in this world, everyone using earbuds should be required to have a flashing “On Air” sign on their foreheads, letting the rest of us know they’re broadcasting and don’t want us talking to them.

I’ve actually gotten better at it over the years, avoiding the trap of responding to people as if anyone was willing to be seen speaking with me in public. I should know better, of course, but I’m so excited to be acknowledged that I jump into the conversation immediately. Almost invariably, I have not been invited.

I fell for it on this particular day, though, because the woman did something almost nobody ever does. She made eye contact. Yes! Hard to believe, but she actually looked me in the eyes as if she was acknowledging that we were both, what’s that word…people.

Eye contact is absolutely a lost art form. Nobody ever looks at you while crossing the street in front of your car or riding with you on the elevator or, well, pretty much ever. It’s as if everyone got the message that looking into someone’s eyes is worse than staring at a solar eclipse.

Believe it or not, kids, there was actually a time when I’d get called out for looking at my computer screen when someone came into the office for a conversation. That sounds quaint now, as if we aren’t all looking at our phones while saying, “Yes, I’m listening,” to the person who left the room ten minutes ago. 

Actually looking at someone while talking to them adds a degree of intimacy to a conversation, almost as if we were two real human beings communicating with each other in a three-dimensional world.  Crazy, I know, but all the great ideas seem crazy at first.

The pendulum swings, though, and eye contact is bound to come back, just like Hula Hoops and Oregon Trail and Nehru jackets. One of these days, some influencer or rock star will start promoting the healing powers of eye contact and we’ll all be staring at each other like it’s 1999.

Until then, could all of you buy some “On Air” tiaras to wear while you’re using your ear buds? It will save me a ton of embarrassment and that’s a small price for the rest of the world to pay on my behalf.

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There’s a theme running through this week’s incredibly wry and witty observations about the world outside my apartment. Big prize for the first person to figure it out…

• Winging It. The sound is getting unbearable in Chicago’s suburbs as cricket mating season moves into full passion. You cannot pass a tree without hearing a few hundred males, scraping their wings to make that godawful chirping noise while every female in the area resigns herself to doing the deed with one of them. It’s a lot like every campus bar in America, but more of the guys are going to get lucky.
  
  
• Magic Fingers. Is there anyone who thinks you need to push the elevator button once for each person who is waiting for a lift? Is there anyone who thinks they can make the elevator come more quickly if only they push the button five or six times instead of only once? Is there anyone who thinks the elevator is off on its coffee break and needs to be reminded that people are waiting, so an extra button press will get its attention? Of course not. Nobody is dumb enough to think any of those things. And yet….
  
  
• Been There. I wandered past Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace the other day, where the sign proclaims it’s been his personal nativity scene since 1899. (Before then, it might have been someone else’s birthplace, but they were nobodies and we don’t care.) It got me thinking about birthplaces, though, because it’s a silly thing to commemorate. Hemingway was born in Oak Park, which means that’s the town he left to achieve fame and fortune. Walt Disney was born in Chicago, but he and Roy set up their cartoon studio in Los Angeles. Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago, too, but he achieved his fame in Montana. As with the rest of life, the place we start is less important than where we finish.
  
  
• Third Wind. There’s an old woman wobbling down the bike path, walking with her arms splayed out so far that you’d think she’s on a tightrope over Niagara Falls.  She has muscular legs, so maybe she was a runner a long, long time ago. Right now, though, she’s a very old woman, struggling to keep whatever’s left of her strength and balance intact. Also right now, I’m very impressed.
  
  
• Men Who Know Too Much. I’ve always believed we should trust the experts, mostly because those are the people who learned the details that they need to gain, you know, expertise. Still, I understand how people can really be suspicious because, in our daily experience, it turns out they’re a bunch of idiots. Take a ride on a bike and you’ll see the number one criterion for designing bike lanes is never to have ridden a bike in your life. (Interviewer: “Have you ever ridden a bicycle?” Applicant: “Yes, almost every day.” Interviewer: “Next!”)
  
  
• Open Secrets. In the good old days, my mailbox overflowed with credit card offers that totaled several million dollars over the course of a year. Now, when I get mail at all, it’s often a five-page letter about a data breach at a company I never heard of that manages data from another company I never heard of that got my information from some app I was forced to download in order to get my tacos delivered. Progress!!
  
  
• The World Is Not Enough. One of the goofiest ideas that’s making the rounds in some political circles is that billionaires aren’t motivated by money, simply because they have all they could ever need. Poppycock. Also, balderdash. It’s part of the human condition to want more and believe we deserve more, no matter how much we have. I knew a woman who said she was compensated fairly and didn’t need more money, so her family had her committed. (JK. I never knew anyone who said that, so no action was required.)
  
  
• Shocking Statistics. On a similar note, I just read a survey of Americans that indicated they think things cost too much, they aren’t making enough money, interest rates are too high, raising kids is too expensive, the government isn’t doing enough for them, the government is doing way too much for everyone else—especially THOSE people—and there’s nothing good on TV. As you might expect, I was very surprised at all of this information.

Yes, I’m easily surprised. Also confused and flummoxed and shocked and aghast and titillated and, hang on, I need to check my thesaurus…   

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I’m not sure it’s even possible for me to serve you better, but we’ll give it a go and see how it all works out...

• Shy of retiring. I know a guy who should be retired now, and he could be retired...except, he can’t. He has the money, he has the achievements to boast about, but he can’t leave, because he has no idea where to go. He laughs at the people who told him his job wouldn’t define his life, because it does define his life. He’s watching as the reaper gets closer, but he can’t seem to find the exit ramp.

 

• Juggling knives. Everyone makes a big deal about the chefs, but the greatest artists at the restaurant are the bussers who find a way to balance 25 plates, 17 glasses, and 297 pieces of flatware on one arm as they clear the table.

 

• Grounds for improvement. It’s 11 a.m., the restaurant opened for brunch at 10:30, and the waiter tells me they don’t have any coffee yet because it’s still brewing. I’m thinking these people are incompetent idiots who don’t know how to run a restaurant. How do you open for brunch without having any coffee ready for people? Then the guy across from me says, “Fresh brewed? Great!!” Clearly, I need an attitude adjustment, or maybe much lower standards.

 

• D. No opinion. We’ve absolutely hit the tipping point and gone over the edge with AI. Suddenly, I ask a friend what they think about something…I dunno, ketchup on hot dogs or duck versus rabbit…and they send back a response that’s clearly generated by AI. Maybe they don’t have any opinions unless the bots say it’s okay, or maybe they’ve been bots all along.

 

• Sharpest tool in the box. Have you ever noticed that the fanciest knives have the dullest blades and the knives with the cheapest handles are sharp enough for brain surgery? There’s probably some life lesson here about worthless trinkets in fancy packages, and I would spend some time thinking about it, but I’ll be busy for the next three hours, trying to slice a bagel.

 

• Doing it just for you. Every time I get a notice that some vendor is moving or consolidating or changing their hours, the missive starts with the same promise to serve me better.
       “To serve you better, we’re moving to cheaper offices down the street and there’s no free parking.”
       “To serve you better, we replaced all the people on our help desk with AI chatbots that will parrot the same FAQ sheet you already have.”
       “To serve you better, we’re adding a 30% service fee to all orders.”
  
  I think this “serve you better” idea came from the same people who wrote To Serve Man.
  
  
• Serving YOU better. To serve our readers better, this week’s post will have only seven items, rather than the normal eight, and this paragraph will be included as one of those items. In order to avoid raising our prices, we will be charging 3% to everyone who reads this paragraph.

 
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The light turned green on Pulaski, but I couldn’t get through the intersection while an old woman was struggling to pull her overloaded wagon across the street. She was moving a half mile an hour, maybe less, pulling on the handle and advancing about a foot with every yank.

It was painful to watch, but I was on the hunt for an available men’s room at the moment and I couldn’t be distracted from my mission. Ten minutes later, I’m back in the car, driving down Foster, and I see that she’s gained about 200 feet.

I park the car, grab a can of oil from my bike bag, and walk over to ask her if she needs help. She accepts right away, of course, so I oil the axles on her cart and give it a pull. The thing is overloaded with about 50 pounds of groceries and the wheels are ridiculously small, so the whole thing is absolutely too much for her to handle, except she has no choice.

She tells me she does this once a month, and I guess that’s when the SNAP benefits come in for her family. She says she has four kids and the food has to last until another month rolls around, so I start doing the math.

At 50 pounds in the cart for her and four kids, that’s roughly five ounces per person per day. Even if everyone is on a diet of lard, that’s only 1,500 calories per day for each of them. Not quite starvation, but nowhere near ample, either.

Now that I’m yoked to the wagon, her gait improves, but she’s still a bit unstable and I notice that she has that crook in her arm that you often see with stroke victims. I think about asking, but then I figure I’m not gonna be here that long and she doesn’t owe me the story of her life. As we cross over the bridge, I’m thinking about giving her some money when we finish. I’ve got about sixty bucks on me and I can spare it, but it would probably mean a lot to her.

But, then, we get to her apartment building and there’s a man outside. Grown man, nice mustache, smoking a cigarette, and he starts going through the cart as soon as we get to her walkway. Maybe he’s one of the four kids she was talking about. Maybe he’s her boyfriend or husband or something.

Whoever he is, he absolutely looks like he could have pulled the damned wagon from the grocery store.
I think of asking him why he let her struggle with the load on her own, but I don’t know their household situation. Maybe he has some hidden deficiency that makes it impossible for him to help. Maybe he got home after she left and he didn’t realize she was trying to do it all on her own. Or, maybe, he’s just a bastard who expects her to do all the work while he stands outside in the sun, smoking a cigarette. I’d go with option C, but maybe I’m just cynical about these things.

I decide to let it lie, and I also decide to keep my sixty bucks for another day. Whatever the situation is, I’m absolutely not buying this guy a pack of smokes. The woman thanks me for my help, the guy says nothing, and I head back to the car.

Life in the city. You can’t beat it.

I’m looking out the window, watching the grandkids playing in the yard, and I realize, yet again, that theirs is a completely different world from mine. In the scrum, even the preteen is still a child, doing everything the seven-year-old is doing, and vice versa.

All the happiness gurus tell us we need to live in the present and this is why. For the moment, and that moment is going to end all too soon, the now is all they need. In a real sense, this moment is all that exists. There are no wars or politics or bills to pay or expectations to meet; no deadlines, no criticisms, and absolutely no Zoom.

Ignorance really is bliss and I envy them for a moment. I watch them run and laugh in a world I inhabited so long ago I cannot recall it. For this moment, at least, their life is filled with fun and friends and pretend…and the laughter is so impossibly precious it creates its own sense of awe. Calling someone childish turns out to be the ultimate compliment.

There’s something about the freedom and the innocence of children that reminds you of a world that we might be able to attain if we could figure out how to make it so. We couldn’t live in that world all the time, of course. There are still the challenges of finding a place to eat and sleep, but we don’t always have to bring those complications everywhere.

As we age, everything we have and everything we do has a value attached. We develop a self-defeating habit of carrying our baggage everywhere, comparing each experience and interaction with a different world at a different time. We frame our days in the context of something that happened to us or our parents or a friend-of-a-friend and we want/hate/need/reject the moment we are in, seeming to prefer another place and time that was, or is, or will almost assuredly be…worse.

The word “profane” refers literally to items left outside the temple, the impure possessions that do not merit entry into the sacred place. Maybe we should think about our baggage that way, as a profanity we are required to check at the door. If we’re lucky, we can abandon some of it when we leave.

As I watch them play, I’m thinking about the years ahead, the challenges of adolescence, the pains of high school, the doubts of careers, the burdens of mortgages. They can’t see it coming, and we should absolutely not tell them about it. This is the peak time, the time they cannot appreciate while it’s happening because they cannot know what’s ahead.

While I'm watching, hoping they get the last atom of enjoyment out of their day, I’m also trying to figure out how to get more joy out of mine. A second childhood is looking better all the time.

The managers at the yacht club bought a statue of a coyote, hoping to scare away the geese who populate the lagoon all summer and make a mess of the facility. And it worked, too, for about a minute. Once the geese figured out it was a fake, they went back to marking up all the poop decks in the harbor.  It turns out that scare coyotes are as useful as scarecrows when it comes to pest control.

Like pretty much every animal, geese are much smarter than people. Their survival depends on their street smarts, even where there are no streets, so they develop a talent for learning what’s a threat and what isn’t, what needs attention and what can be ignored.  

If only people were that insightful, we’d all be better off. Not only are people dumber than geese, we have a truly annoying habit of overestimating just how smart we really are.  Perversely, or maybe inevitably, we tend to overstate our smarts in the areas where we know the least. For instance…

Nobody knows more about how dangerous Chicago is than people who live in a suburb 30 miles away. Do I need to add “almost all white” to that note, or is it a given? My friends in the suburbs will lecture me nonstop about the threats I would face if I ever journey down the deadly streets I actually do journey down every damned day. And it’s a given that they know much more about my mayor and city council and police department and schools than I do. One day, I should ask them the name of their police chief or mayor or...never mind.

Nobody knows more about the Black experience than an over-educated liberal who is simultaneously wracked by the limitless guilt of white oppression and the unsurpassed arrogance of a supreme ally who truly feels their pain.  Ditto for the Native American experience, the immigrant experience, the AAPI experience...never mind.

Nobody knows more about all that 14-dimensional chess that Trump is always playing than some high-school dropout in a trailer park in Mississippi. Was that too specific? Sorry, I should have included a bunch of suburbanites with master’s degrees in that cohort.

Nobody knows more about investing than some guy who went to med school and nobody knows more about government than a guy who runs a car company and nobody knows more about how to argue before the Supreme Court more than a guy who binged Law & Order last week.

It’s as if every one of us spent the last night at a Holiday Inn Express.

Whenever I spend some time with a true expert in a field, or even an avid hobbyist, I get a sense of how uninformed I really am. And that’s a good thing, because we all have our zone of competence and, ipso facto, our zone of incompetence. Knowing where expertise ends and ignorance begins is a form of wisdom that’s also a great survival skill.

By the way, if anyone is in the market for a slightly used coyote statue, I think I can set you up with a motivated seller.