Northbound

I still don’t know why I did it.  I had the day off and I was going to go up to East Rutherford to pick up some tile.  We’d gotten part of our backsplash in our kitchen tiled, but not the rest of it, and the only way to get a match was to go up to the one place that had it, and you don’t care anyway, but that’s where I was going.  I had lunch at the Chinese buffet in Hillsborough, which was bad enough already, and has now gone downhill enough that I won’t be going back.  I left the restaurant and decided to stop by the house for a minute before I left.

So I was driving southbound on 206, which is the main drag through Hillsborough, and there was this guy.  In his eighties, was my guess, and he was hitchhiking.  He was on the side of the road, over by the Bottle King, and he had his thumb out.  I hadn’t seen that in, well, I guess, forever.  People don’t hitchhike like that, or they haven’t in my lifetime.  I was surprised more than anything else, and I guess maybe that’s why I stopped.

I knew it was a stupid thing to do.  Idiotic, even.  There was a guy – I hope I am remembering this right – in my church when I was a teenager who picked up a hitchhiker and got shot for his trouble.  He wouldn’t have done it except that he knew the hitchhiker; he’d been a student of his or something.  But he still got shot (although not fatally).  It is not something I would ever do, which makes me wonder why I did it.

He said he was going to the big development just south of ours; it was out of my way but not so far that it made much of a difference.  He got in, put the plus-size bottle of wine he was carrying on the floorboard, buckled his seatbelt, and we were off.  He told me the wine was for a recipe he was working on.  I didn’t believe him.

I didn’t want to talk to him.  Not that I didn’t want to be sociable or anything, but I didn’t want him to know who I was.  I didn’t want to get involved.  That can happen, especially if you have the kind of job I have, where you end up getting involved.  I was willing to give him a ride but not to compound that mistake with anything else.

I don’t know where it was, but one of the businesses on 206 had their flag at half-staff, and he wondered why.  “Probably for Fort Hood,” I said.

“Is today Veteran’s Day?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

And then he started telling me how he’d lied about his age to go into the Navy, how they’d bombarded Japan at the end of the war, and how he’d cruised all around the world.  “The admiral, you see, wanted to visit all these countries, and the ship goes where the admiral wants it to go, see?”

We pulled into his development and I dropped him off in front of his apartment.  He thanked me, and explained – for no particular reason – that he was a vodka drinker, but switched to wine when his stomach went bad.  I drove off and went home, ran the last little errand I needed to, and headed to East Rutherford for my tile.

I tell this story for three reasons.  First, don’t pick up hitchhikers.  Second, I don’t know if what this guy was saying was true, but if it was, well, God bless him for his service, and all those who have served honorably and well.  Third, I am not trying to say here that giving a veteran (if that’s what he was) a ride home from the liquor store is any way to commemmorate Veteran’s Day, but that’s what I did.  I don’t feel that great about it, but it was more than what a lot of people do.