I was just skimming through the new issue of Tablet, a free magazine that’s distributed around town, and I learned something unusual about one of my neighbors – a woman who’s working at the reservoir construction across from my apartment building.
She’s a flagger. She stands on the corner with a reversible Stop/Slow sign and directs traffic whenever the big trucks come barreling in or out of the park with their loads of gravel. I come and go a lot during the day, and when I walk by I usually nod hello.
Say What? is Tablet’s man on the street column. They ask a dozen people the same question and print the answers alongside a photo of the interview subjects. The flagger was one of the people that they talked to. There’s a photo of her on the job – standing with her sign while, in the background, a truck maneuvers around my intersection’s traffic circle. The question is, “What is the most disgusting thing you have ever put in your mouth?” She answered, “Monkeys in South Africa. I picked out the BB bullets.” Maybe I can use that as a conversation starter. I can ask her what monkey tastes like. Maybe not.
I read this last night and was thinking about it again as I was wandering about my morning web routine and thinking about the monkeys and the BBs and all and decided I wanted to comment.
As I was coming in I was composing my comment–“Say what?” was what I had decided to say.
Do you think that I remembered somewhere in the back of my mind the name of the feature? Or was her response just so totally right for that heading that you can’t help but ask “Say what?”
In my newspaper days, my turn to ask the question of the week came every other week. It was sometimes difficult to come up with a good question, but I don’t think I would have ever come up with that one.