Re: sound recordings


Subject: Re: sound recordings
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sat May 13 2000 - 20:28:59 GMT


At 3:31 PM -0700 on 5/13/2000, you wrote:

> Forgive me if I'm prying, and if I am, feel free to ignore me. But how
> the hell did such a meeting occur? Were you looking for it to occur or
> was it chance? Was the content of his words meaningful or was he just
> trying to get you to leave him alone? I'm sure it's a prejudiced
> assumption, but for some reason I have a hard time imagining him as
> being overly friendly with strangers.

It was chance the time we spoke the most; I had a VW bus whose
transmission was almost as useful as a dung beetle. I was driving
down a road in Cornish and the gearshift became disconnected from the
rod that runs into the transmission, and I was trying to re-engage
it, when along came this vintage BMW and it was our man from Cornish.
He asked me if I needed help, and I described the problem (not
expecting or wanting help from him!), and he gave me advice about the
best gas station in town. I ended up getting it pieced back together
on my own. He sped off (to get his mail? to get the Times?) and
that was that, just a friendly side-of-the-road event.

Another time was brush-clearing season and he was clearing brush off
the road. It was just a neighborly kind of thing that time.

In neither instance did I treat him as "J.D. Salinger," but rather as
a fellow New Hampshire person, which worked just fine.

In the letter I received from him (in reply to a note I mailed), he
was cordial, not standoffish nor nasty nor dismissive. But I didn't
approach him with that literary stalker angle that so many people
have taken, so perhaps he realized I wasn't a troublemaker for him.
It was just a gentle reply that firmly indicated his lack of interest
in meeting strangers. I don't think I saw him again after that, but
it has been a while now since I left New Hampshire forever, and I may
not have the events in order.

--tim
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