(Image by Mile Modic, via Unsplash)
Walter:
Were you listening to The Dude’s story, Donny?
The Dude:
Walter…
Donny:
What?
Walter:
Were you listening to The Dude’s story?
Donny:
I was bowling.
Walter:
So you have no frame of reference here, Donny. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know…
The Dude:
(interrupting) Walter, Walter, what’s the point, man?
Walter:
There’s no reason – here’s my point, dude, there’s no fucking reason why these two…
Donny:
Yeah, Walter, what’s your point?
You never get far away from town business when you’re in local government. I was getting ready to help out a little on our home construction site, and the lift operator came over to me. “I’d like to talk to you some time about this gravel situation.” And then I scarcely was able to track the next ten minutes, in which he told me about his pit that we didn’t buy from this year, and all the other pits around and which do and don’t provide good material, and about how he’s ready to help the Town any time but he won’t help the road foreman (even though the foreman is his cousin)… it was a real-time tour of the inside of someone’s mind.
I told Nora later that working in a small town is always like coming in to the middle of a movie—people you don’t know, doing things you don’t understand, for reasons you’ll never hear. These are people who have come to their judgments of one another over decades, and who they are today is deeply inflected by who they’ve been before, who they’ve been around, who was kind to them or cruel to them or unfair to them, who slept with whom before who. It’s like the Garden of Eden: it’s a beautiful physical landscape, and if you go back one generation, everyone had the same parents.
But really, we encounter everyone we ever meet in the middle of the movie. That person who was thoughtless to us… they were raised in ways we’ll never know, have neurological structures we’ll never see, have goals that they probably can’t fully articulate even to themselves. I spent decades trying to look like I had my shit together, and I fooled a lot of people into thinking that I was a capable and balanced person. (Boy, were THEY wrong!)
When I first started studying teenagers, I met a big group of kids who met pretty much every night at a gravel parking lot in the middle of town. There were 25 other parking lots around town, but they (and their aunts and uncles and parents) always landed on this one. Now, we might think it’s strange, but if this is chosen and the others aren’t, there must be a reason for it. They’re trying to accomplish something, and using this tool to do it. It turned out that with a little patience and a lot of questions, I uncovered eight or ten things this parking lot did that made it perfect for teenage and young adult social life.
The great anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote that every good anthropologist he’d ever met had felt like an outsider as a kid. They learned not to take anything for granted, they studied the world around them rather than just accepting it as invisible and “normal.” Judgment comes from believing that you know the rules; understanding comes from trying to learn someone else’s rules.
So remember today that when someone pisses you off, or confuses you, or does something heartless… you’re walking into the middle of the movie, and you just don’t know enough to pass judgment.
Herb Childress 