"Tough loss last weekend," the heavy, fifties-something guy said to me familiarly yesterday as I followed my wife obediently down an aisle at one of our local up-scale food stores.
"Why is that?" I said.
"Well...the game," he said, a little flustered.
"What game would that be?"
"Uh, Harvard-Yale."
"What about it?" I'd finally understood what he was talking about, if not why.
"Harvard won," he declared.
"So...?" I countered, rejecting his invitation to get with the stereotype.
"Well, it was a big loss, you know."
"You don't say. For whom?"
"For Yalies!" he emphasized, his eyes flicking down uncertainly to the insignia on my dark blue fleece pullover.
I paused a moment for emphasis. "Not to me."
"Well, it is for most Yalies...." He trailed off as he followed his own wife down another aisle.
In the checkout lane, I felt distinctly uneasy, even if I had only the vaguest idea why. I had been accosted in a sort of a way, made to feel vulnerable. The onus was on the other guy for that. But he was probably just reaching out for a little man-to-man bonding, some recognition that he was in on things. Why had I withheld it? The interchange had never become a conversation in which we might have revealed something personal about one another. I would like to have told him what I really thought about intercollegiate athletics (and professional sports generally). And I was now wondering where he had gone to college, what he did now, what
his values were. Was he someone I could like? What he had said to me didn't necessarily prove that he thought college football was a big deal...Was I someone he could like?
In the car, I told my wife what the guy and I had said to one another.
"You baffled him," she said. "He probably concluded you bought your pullover at a thrift shop somewhere."
