I know strange things. I know to drive past the airport in Minneapolis 
to get to the closest gas station. I know that the clock in my kitchen 
is four minutes slow. I know that when my son was two he hated to get 
his hands dirty. I know that in one of the women's restrooms in the 
Seattle airport the door of one stall flies open when the other stall 
door closes. I know that no one will ever ask me those things.

"No experience is ever wasted," my mother would say as I grew up. Would 
she say that still? Would she say that about the bathroom stalls in the 
Seattle airport, a place in an airport in a city she will likely never 
see, having decided she is too old to go to somewhere new?

I once had a dream that we pulled our character behind us like a 
rollaboard suitcase, labeled for everyone to see. Honest, arrogant, 
kind, loyal, thief. Trailing the consequences and the evidence of the 
things we had done to each other.

We pull the things we know behind us, the strange, the obvious, the 
remarkable, and the helpful, unlabeled and invisible, until we give them
away, until we get close enough to read the questions in each other's 
eyes, and recognize the wisdom in the lines of a face. We give them away
because eventually, we have enough to carry.

I'm waiting for someone to ask me about the bathroom doors in Seattle. 
Some day it will happen. Some day, that thing that I know that I pull 
around behind me will matter to someone else, and on that day we will 
both be lighter for it.