“The people you see at the Subaru Dealership!” blurted a colleague of mine as he breezed past me toward the service desk this Saturday morning. I was waiting for my five-thousand-mile check-up in the makeshift winter lodge waiting area fitted with faux stone fireplace and a few stuffed reindeer. Moments before Jim entered this Outback & Crosstrek Lodge, I made my Saturday morning offering to the coffee-grind grave of Keurig pods. He funneled my way.

Jim is a fellow teacher at the high school where I began working four months ago; he’s been at it for as long as I have: over two decades. He assumes that because I’m new here, in Georgia, I’m also new to the profession. He also has no idea that, like him, I’m originally from Ohio. Even though he’s my Wednesday morning Faculty Book Club leader, and I’m one of three English teachers at our small school, he knows virtually nothing about me. If the winter Olympics included an Ice-a-New-Colleague-Out event, he’d win gold.

“So, you drive a Subaru, too,” he confirms, almost an exhale as he sits across from the cardboard hot cocoa display.

“Yes.” I attempt to smile with the warmth appropriate for forced holiday settings, for a fellow winter traveler resting from the crowded slopes of oil changes and tire rotations.

“Yours must be that little silver one that parks by the football field.” Everything in the South, I have come to learn, revolves around football.

“Well, I don’t know about little, but it certainly is silver,” I respond. Furious at myself for entering a pissing match over the sizes of our vehicles when we are talking about offbeat, Japanese crossover SUVs, I try to engage. “We bought it when the school year started. Since we now live within driving distance of our daughter’s college, she took my old car to campus.”

“Where does she go?” It was happening. He asked a question about me—the first cool, bubbly sip of Diet Coke after popping off the cap.

“Sewanee, in Tennessee.”

He launched into a ten-minute TED Talk about a former student who attended Sewanee. I learned all about this nameless, faceless person’s major, minor, work-study program, and even his favorite meal at McClurg Dining Hall. The Diet Coke had gone warm and flat.

“I’ve taught so many seniors, I can’t keep them all straight.” I wondered if teaching so many seniors also kept him from asking about my daughter. In a perfect world, I could tell him about her Tennessee Williams class or her hours as an Arts Fellow working as a quilter in the studio. Would he have cared that she loves the sweet potato curry at McClurg? When I meet a bore, I just talk about myself— that shuts them up, a friend advised me recently. Perhaps Jim heard the same advice. Could I be the bore?

I found myself almost shouting, “How was your Thanksgiving break?”

“We visited my mom up in Ohio. I had forgotten how cold November is there.”

Do I tell him and offer this flailing conversation yet another life buoy?

“I’m from—”

“Once you cross that river into Cincinnati, you feel the chill. There’s a spot on I-75 called the Cut in the Hill where you can see the Ohio River basin and the Cincinnati skyline. It’s beautiful, but the cold just ruins it for me.”

I would have loved to tell him I had a framed photograph of that view in my first apartment, that my dad used to drive over the Brent Spence Bridge with me just so we could turn the car back around and see the Cut in the Hill, that he would play Connie Smith on cassette and belt out there she lies at the Cut in the Hill / shinin’ like a jewel in the valley below / Cincinnati, O-hi-o.

“But you’re from Los Angeles, huh?” He made his best effort. “I’ve only been to the airport once. I just couldn’t do California.”

Here was the geographical equivalent of El Dorado, the Emerald City, and Hogsmeade Village all rolled into one mystical, magical place of wonder he had never visited. And here I was having made a life there. And here we both were with a lot of time to kill. In an ad-hoc ski lodge offering 0% APR financing, no less. He asked me nothing.

How I would have loved to tell him about winter plankton lighting up Long Beach with electric blue waves at night. How I would have loved to tell him about the urban coyotes that strut down neighborhood sidewalks in the early mornings. Or the way that the famed sunsets surpass even their magical reputation. How I would have loved to tell him about the diverse and myriad friends, neighbors, and colleagues who made LA the most beautiful place in the world to live.

“I think my wife was in San Francisco once.”

“Ms. Kelsey?” the service representative called from behind a tinseled tire display, paperwork in hand. “Your car is ready.”

“The little silver one?” I stood up, turned to Jim, and lied about how nice it was to finally have a conversation with him.

As I drove out, I made peace with the difficulty to connect with Jim, who in some ways became the metaphoric juggernaut of misfired attempts. It just takes time was the refrain many of my friends in LA texted. Southerners are slow to befriend, but once they do, it’s for life was another one. Maybe it was me. Perhaps I was the bore no one could tolerate, and Jim is doubled over in laughter with the other Subaru drivers much more interesting than I ever could be.

*