I'm from New England so I'm rude. Or more accurately, I keep to myself a lot and I consider a lot of politeness fake. We New Englanders don't consider ourselves rude, mind you. We consider ourselves real.

I was pretty stunned by the level of friendliness in the midwest and have never entirely been comfortable with it. Compared to Boston, Chicago is a very friendly town. One thing that I've never been very good at is saying hello to people I don't know. Seems odd to me, or like I'm a freshman in college again.

There's this guy I see every single day on my way to the Western El stop. He's shorter than I am (which is short) and probably in his sixties. He's overweight and walks like he's a bit bull-legged. He wears a Cubs hat every day. He has a really big mouth, I think, and pock-marked skin. He started smiling at me one day, as if to say hello. This was a few months ago. It was then that I reallized that I pass him every day. I think this was his way of being real. After all, if you pass someone every day on the street, that's a relationship--according to the Buddhists it's even a relationship with karmic significance--and maybe you're a faker if you ignore it.

Nevertheless, I felt taken aback by this and for a few days wondered if I knew this guy, if he were some neighbor I had never noticed. Finally I started smiling back at him. As the weeks went by, his smiles got bigger and bigger, and he even began to add a nod to it while he hobbled by. Then he would smile and nod well before he got anywhere near me.

This was too much for me to reciprocate. I still have to pretend like I don't notice him until he's a few feet away. I don't know why. I just feel compelled to respond to this man in a way that doesn't hurt his feelings. I don't respond because it feels right to me. If he hadn't started this whole relationship, I think I still wouldn't have noticed him.

Today he yet again demanded a new level of friendship from me. He said "hello". I said "hello" back as I passed, almost as stunned as the first day he smiled at me. I realized not so long ago that I connect a level of unpleasant obligation to relationships that fall outside the romantic. I used to think that I had no close friends in this town because that's what life at my age is like. It was only recently that I realized that I actively keep people at a distance, that I will even modify my behavior (pretend not to notice people as they cross the street smiling at me) so that I don't have to make friendships with them.

Maybe I'm just a New Englander who feels out of place in the Midwest. Maybe a part of me never recovered from my brother's death. Maybe the two friendships I had that went really badly in the past threw me off kilter, somehow. Maybe I'm just shy. But sometimes I think one of the hardest things in the world is having a conversation with someone new.

Anyway, it occurs to me that the Buddhists must be right, and New Englanders perhaps tend to overlook the significance of passers-by.

Is it me or do some people you know look and act like other people you know, almost like they were made from the same parts or decended from the same ancestor, like there are ten or eleven souls on the planet that just get recycled over and over? Maybe it's me. Or maybe it's our human need to contextualize everything. I have an ex girlfriend whom I've seen in other people a few times. I even think that she and my fiance have similarities. They actually have similar hand-writing, too.

I was once working on a novel about a guy who was cryogenically frozen and launched into space. His DNA is cloned thousands of years later. But the world he's reborn into is very different and he grows up the only individual living in a world of clones. Specifically six clones, cloned repeatedly--three men and three women. He has the same two relationships over and over again. One with a woman he loves but she doesn't love him and the other with a woman who adores him, but he can't love her back. He goes back and forth between passion and safety. Eventually he travels back in time, desperate to meet the self that he once was and to see the era that his DNA belongs to, as he imagines it much more diverse and exciting. But the past self he encouters feels just as out of place, and just as surrounded by "clones" as he does. And eventually, our hero sees things that way too and is also disappointed with the past. My story had no ending though, and Egar Allen Poe said that you shouldn't start a story unless you know how it's going to end. So I think I only wrote about 15 or 20 pages of the sucker.

Funny. I've never been a big Poe fan.

Chapter 1 From The BOOK of SIBLINGS (From The Big Book of Everything)

1:1 Michael hated Robert because Robert made more money.

1:2 Robert hated Michael because his wife was prettier.

1:3 Michael and Robert were boring and shallow.

There's a man who works in my office named Carlos. He runs Office Services--unsung heroes of maintenance, repairs and supplies. He is one of the most loveable guys, very freindly and very genuine. You meet him and you feel a little sad because you know that someday his family won't have him in their lives anymore. He makes me think of my dad. Carlos doesn't look like he's close to retirement but I think he probably is. Black people age so well, it's impossible to tell how old they are. But I have a feeling that he's older than he looks, and we'll lose him to retirement soon. Did you know that some huge percentage of people die about two years after retirement? That just raises too many intresting questions to get into. My father retired a couple years ago. It's the strangest thing. He's always been healthy apart from his hips and his knees. I mean, the man never missed a day of work and when he got sick it was always for about a day. But I've always worried that I was going to lose him before his time.

One day I decided to find out if I could get the company I work for to donate a video projector to the Neo-Futurists. I decided to ask Carlos if he knew where I should start asking. He said he had some broken projectors that he kept around for spare parts and he could build one for me. Just like that. And then a few weeks later my theater company had a video projector. It made a lot of projects possible and a lot of Neo-Futurists happy. And Carlos doesn't know a thing about the Neo-Futurists. He just did it because I asked.

I don't think that I thanked him enough. I think I meant to buy him a card or send him something but didn't. Getting me to even think about something like a card is a feat in and of itself.

I've probably worried about my father all these years because we have a pretty distant relationship. I'm an artist. He belongs to IBEW. I'm a liberal. He's a conservative. The list goes on, and as the years do, I worry about worry. I don't want to find myself trying desperately to make a connection but failing, looking for those last words to share when he's lying in a hospital bed. I don't want to worry over the card I never sent or the gift I never sent or the thing I never said.

I don't always say hi to Carlos, but Carlos always says 'hi' to me and when he does, he wakes me up and I remember good things, like happy moods and honest people. One day, I spilled some coffee on my way to my desk. I put my cup down at my desk and then went back to clean it up. Carlos was busy in the cafeteria and noticed me leave and then come back. He stopped what he was doing and said "hey, Andy. Why not do what everyone else does and just leave it for somebody else to trip on?" It was a compliment. It was a good deed gone noticed when I had no interest in getting attention.

Good people just do it for me. If I could be remembered that way, I'd be ready to die myself.