“1 July ’43,” the man said to the clerk. He asked her if she had seen the movie The Bridge Over the River Kwai. She crafted a small smile, glanced around nervously and replied that she had. “You have?” There was delight in his voice, and the man raised a gnarled and spotted hand to lift his hat from a gray head. He looked at the brown cowboy headgear and said, “I didn’t wear the hat.”
I stood behind the man in the checkout lane of a store; the business he was conducting required some precise attention from the clerk, who seemed distracted by his conversation. I assumed that the hat he had not worn represented something about the bridge. The man continued, “Do you know what a ‘B-24’ is?” (“Liberator,” I thought.) The clerk looked up from her task at the computer screen and said, “Yes.”
I moved to another checkout line and tried to eavesdrop on the man’s conversation. I thought I heard him say, “clipping treetops” but could hear no more. I wanted to hear the man’s story, but I did not want to intrude. When I left the store, I went to the house I was guarding and looked up the story of the bridge. I could find no connection between “1 July ‘43” and the bridge over the river Kwai. But those overheard words were, for me, an emotional example of Dr. Edmond Locard’s “exchange principle,” or what the lab geeks on “CSI: Miami” call “transfer.” Locard was a French forensic scientist who, in 1910, created a laboratory of technical police. His idea was that in any contact between “bodies, objects, materials, and spaces … residual traces are deposited and exchanged.” (I connected the dots between Dr. Locard and Horatio Caine when I heard a reference on a PBS program called “Murder On The Home Front.”)
What I am calling “emotional transfer” is an everyday occurrence, albeit slightly different from “CSI” transfer. That aged man’s reverie, his reminiscences on the life he had lived and the deeds he performed changed me at the molecular level, though I transferred nothing to him. He did not see me, never knew of my curiosity and wonder about his life’s story, yet I am a slightly different person for having heard that exchange. He dusted me with his experience, transferred to me the moments of his life that were meaningful enough to discuss in a public place and charged my imagination. My awareness has been heightened of the “Greatest Generation” and the veterans of World War II because I stepped outside of myself for a moment in that store. In my mind, I wrote a story of that man’s “1 July ’43,” his B-24 Liberator clipping treetops, its great shadow rippling across a bridge and the river below it.
When my best friend’s missed a flight from Denver to Indianapolis, she asked “Uncle CJ” to rescue her. I picked up my “niece” from the airport and lodged her for the night in my little apartment. She is 24 now, and in that night and the following morning, I had the first conversations with her as an adult. As I later told her father, I found her to be a delightful human being. I sent this message to my eldest daughter, who has held the child in her arms: “Baby Jess is an interesting young woman. You would enjoy talking to her.”
I hope that I was able to transfer something of equal value to her, something as interesting and energizing as my encounter with the old man in the store.