At seven o’clock at night the NPR I can hear dependably fades off into a kind of classical music I find dull as shit. So I’ll go back to the AM dial, and this time of year there is usually a Rockies game being broadcast live from a place far away in space and time, called Denver.

I was out and about because I needed the reverse osmosis water again, for home made coffee and Pellegrino, and i was hurrying because I wanted to get the trash to the curb and get the gate closed before full dark. This is what passes for drama in my current existence.

From across the parking lot I hear a small hubbub or commotion and routinely ignore it, moving on. Then a male voice bellowed my name with a note of challenge in the coarse sound.

It was only the Special Needs Grandson though, trying to get my attention because his little old grandma couldn’t do it.

She turned out to be a former student from years ago. I barely remembered her face and couldn’t come up with her name even at gunpoint, but God she remembered me, in detail. She began to talk and talk.

Back when she knew me, I would have been looking for a way out of the conversation from the first sentence. Today, while that impulse was still there, I crushed it down and leaned into listening intently, into responding judiciously, into giving no sign that I was antsy or wanted to get away.

She got to end it finally, twenty or thirty minutes in.

The whole time I was studying her old life and what it had done to her and her hulking grunting grandbaby bodyguard standing nearby. Most of her discourse was about how much better her native ways were. The example that crystallized it all was that she told me she had a vision once, of palm trees, in a place called Palm Springs in California–she knew there were palm trees there before she ever laid eyes on the place! The spirits told her.

It briefly made me feel very old and cynical about things that used to excite and impress me. But still I stayed, and nodded, and interjected just enough to set her off on yet another fresh tangent about how the Beauty Way was the better way.

I saw her not as an ancient wise native woman, but as another ground-down working-class victim of the shiny white Machine.

I finished my degrees and she didn’t. I was given a nominal boy self and she got one more girlish. That constitutes the whole of the major differences between us. Other than that we’re the same person, of the same time and place. We both hung out around that lone school for miles for a while. We touched each others souls with a brushing caress.

So I let her talk as long as she liked, where my former being would have made excuses and dashed off.

It felt like the right thing to be in the moment and it still does.