Seeking

"Touch his ears, they're the softest part," a man tells a child who is petting his dog at Local Coffee.

It's Halloween, the whole town has passed through the cafe today, a kind of census.

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I used to read Paris Review interviews with writers, one after the other. A kind of seeking.

My favorite part of any interview was when they asked the writer about a typical day. Many said they wrote in the morning. They ran or napped or lunched or all three. In the evening, they read, edited, answered letters.

For a time I carved out this kind of life for myself. Except the letters I answered, were emails from Redbeard clients, or riders, as I sometimes called them, to see if that changed how I felt about the whole thing.

This time was after the ten years of brick-and-mortar operations on Jay Street, but before energy and willpower and money ran out, and we took the shop apart and stashed it in the garden shed.

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I remember selling gloves to riders on Jay Street. It was more counseling than selling. Asking questions to figure out which glove was right for their use case. How long would they be riding? What temperature was a dealbreaker for them? Did they ride in the rain? Did they need to use a phone, pull a zipper?

There were so many variants: levels of warmth, notches of windproofness, and the hard inescapable fact of water resistant versus water proof.

We took so much care.

Money was often a third body in the conversation.

"That's so expensive." / ("More expensive than cold?")

We took on riders' relationship with money, added it to our own relationship with the thing. We knew what each glove variant had cost us, how many we'd ordered, how long it would take to get more (if we could get more – certain sizes or colors might be sold out for the season).

If we pre-ordered a certain amount in the summer, we got slightly better pricing and could pay in the spring. But we couldn't return what didn't sell. We were on the hook. So we pre-ordered just enough to get the benefits of ordering early.

Then in the fall and the winter, we gambled about when to re-order. If we still had gloves left over when it got warm, we'd have to discount them, rather than storing them till next winter.

Late enough into the season, if people thought it was about to warm up, they might prefer to make do without gloves, especially if they'd made it this far without them, or if they'd just lost theirs, or they didn't know if they'd ride next winter. They didn't believe next winter would be cold? They didn't believe they would be alive?

Divinity School • a letter every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen