Parking lot connections

This is my first official Scribble Theology post!  If you're missing what I'm talking about, please note that I changed the title of this blog.

I took a guy's space in the CVS parking lot today.  He was sixty-something, drove a red pickup truck, and wore a black hat with pins on it (I didn't look closely, but it made me suspect that he's a veteran).  He hovered in front of me for a minute, perhaps expecting I would sense that I was in his place and move, then parked next to me.

"I was going to take that spot," he told me as he hopped out of his truck.

"Yeah, I saw that," I said, putting my mittens in my pockets.  "And I said to myself, 'I'm going to take this guy's spot.'"  Not the first time I used humor in questionable circumstances, but at least this time nobody was pointing a gun at me.

I'm not sure he got it, because he told me it was okay.  He showed me the space in which he usually parks--a handicap space occupied by a car with no handicap tag--then told me he was here to pick something up for his wife.  I didn't catch the name of it, but the pharmacist directed him to the "oral hygiene" section.

I am always puzzled by strangers who share with me these details about their lives.  Elderly ones, particularly.  Someone my age wouldn't have told me those things, and if he did, I would have thought "nobody cares where you usually park, and you look like a moron in that hoodie."  But somehow, from the post-middle-aged, these things are interesting.  Maybe it's because they are foreign to me, and I'm more interested in the thoughts that underlie what they say.  Why did this man choose to tell me about his usual parking space and his oral hygiene-challenged wife?

Humans long for connection with others--humans of all ages.  I don't think this man was under the impression these bits of his life were of crucial importance to me or anyone else, but perhaps he's learned over the course of his life not to be afraid to reach out and connect, even to a stranger in the parking lot whom he will likely never see again.

I'm not encouraging you to share with me the state of your partner's oral hygiene.  But perhaps we should all stop and ask how often we miss the opportunity to connect, thinking that it is somehow better to offer nothing than to offer something that might not be interesting.

Start a blog.