Ah, so the man you saw crossing Garfield yesterday with the tripod slung over his shoulder was not a photographer but a surveyor! For here is another such tripod, and here is still another such, and there, ensconced in the shaded green gulley, is the surveyor himself…. He doesn’t appear to have noticed you…. And this, on the footbridge railing, is undoubtedly his empty box of tic tacs, which, like the surveyor himself, seems an unlikely object to encounter in the woods.
Why could you not have had a skill of that kind, a skill like surveying? It’s because you don’t get things exactly right — you say “dative shmative.” It’s because you’re almost a little afraid to get things exactly right. (There seems something impolitic and dangerous and committed about being exactly right.) And these are populist instincts of yours that evoke the national decline.
Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon involves surveying; Thoreau had worked as a surveyor; K. from The Castle identifies himself as a surveyor; as had that customer whose name I’m forgetting — Nick? Ed?… single father… definitely not Brad but his son was named “after his favorite philosopher,” I recall this dad having said, Spinoza. He was the son of a single parent himself. Skater kid, libertarian impulses. Moved to North Dakota during the pandemic, which was also the natural gas boom there, but it had been a “gas boom bust” for him; he had probably caught the tail end of it; he had had to move back East and last I saw him he was again on the move with his son, this time to St. Louis.
I knew and half-knew a lot of names at that shop but unless I was entirely positive I knew a customer’s name I would never address them by their name. In that sense, which is a dubious sense, I would tend to get things “exactly right.” (There were a couple embarrassing exceptions. And then there was that customer who started calling me Tom and it was just too awkward to correct her and it went on for years, it went on for actual years, and one day she learned my name was not in fact Tom and she asked why I had never corrected her and she is dead now but I am sorry for that. People tended to address me with any name that was monosyllabic and Biblical — John, Pete, Tom, Jim, which I was fine with…But I tried to get ahead of it after my experience with the woman who called me Tom and would say things like “it doesn’t make any difference at all, but my name is actually Paul.”)
This customer who worked in surveying and whose name was quite possibly Tim said Arlington had exacting zoning requirements and you couldn’t be off by a quarter of an inch. He said St. Louis was a nice town despite having areas of blight. (I remember him having used that word ‘blight’ — good word.) And he told this story of how he’d had an Amazon package stolen from his front door but the package contained one of those trackable key fobs and he was actually able to track where the person who’d taken his package went. Turned out the person lived in the building next to his and worked at a nail salon across town, but when I asked him a few weeks later how the situation had resolved he demurred and seemed reluctant to say. Perhaps he was sorry that I remembered. My impression was that he dropped it.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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