In the tasting room of my favorite cidery, I like to sit in a particular place. When I enter the room, I immediately head for a corner where the L-shaped bar meets a wall. I think of this corner as “my place,” and I am greeted and treated well by all of the staff of Ash & Elm. Most of the staff members know that I have a particular preference in cider, but will come to verify that I am going to maintain my custom, or if I’m bolting the corral and heading for the range. I have a vision of myself as a customer: I am quiet and undemanding and reserved with others unless engaged. That notion was dispelled when the tasting room manger said to me, “You’re actually quite chatty.”
When Melissa said that to me, I was only briefly surprised to hear it; I remembered when a co-worker in the advertising department of a St. Louis department store dryly commented, “You are a fan of your own voice.” That long-ago comment temporarily interrupted the stream of yap to which I had been subjecting the co-worker, but I thought about it again when told that I was “chatty.” I realized that my private description of myself does not match my public persona.
I sent to my first bride a copy of a column I wrote about the “Ws,” the lights atop the Westinghouse Supply Company’s building on the north side of the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, as she figures prominently in my reminiscences of visiting the river. She read it and told me that when I wrote of my inability to counsel and comfort a grieving person, it was a show of self-awareness and acknowledgement of something about me that she had known for a long time. Comedian Flip Wilson’s character, “Geraldine” used to say, “What you see is what you get,” and in an Indiana firefight that passed for a midterm election, a candidate told his audience, “I am who I say I am.” “Geraldine” was Flip Wilson in drag, so what you saw was not what you got, and when I say that I am quiet and shy, hands in the audience fly up, waving for attention, eager to say: “No way!”
When some people learn that I write a column for this newspaper, they ask, “What do you write about?” I used to struggle with that, and “uhh . ..” was my best answer. I briefly considered, “Whatever I want,” but that tells you nothing. But I am, after all, an artist, and every artist should have some bloviation describing her work (see what I did there?) and I have settled on, “I write about my collisions with life, and my observations of the human condition.” Has a smell of erudition, don’t you think? But after dropping that knowledge, I think, jeez, man: Nobody knows what that (stuff) means! The creative director of this publication once described me as a “humorist” in an early bio, a description that was apt for the time, since my first columns were rife with hilarious takes on my life: my diligent avoidance of combat (“Fight Club”) or my disastrous childhood experiments mixing dangerous chemicals (“Invisible, Invisible Ink”)
I cannot describe myself, except in physical terms: 6’ 1”, gray hair, brown eyes, 172 pounds. The rest of who I might be, I’ll just have to write on the walls of memory and let historians decipher the hieroglyphics, for it is clear to me that, when I think of myself as taciturn and another sees me as chatty, I am not who I think I am.