Yesterday at the grocery store a young man standing near the entrance tried to hand me a flyer as I grabbed a cart and pivoted toward the door. I gave it right back. His mistake was not following the advice of former Wisconsin Congressman Tom Petri.
That wisdom is relayed by Alexandra Petri, his daughter and a Washington Post columnist, in her book “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.” She talks about being a kid on the campaign trail and how their team would hand out Packers schedules at parades.
“I always find that if you say ‘Have a thing,’ they don’t know what it is, so they take it!”
The guy at Giant gave me the flyer while explaining that it had to do with purchasing steamed crabs. That gave me the opportunity to awkwardly hand it back to someone who wasn’t ready, setting off a fumble and near drop of said piece of paper that was useless to this non-seafood eater.
Petri’s book covers a lot of what it is to grow up, find your things and move through a world that at times finds those things (and you) odd. Interspersed throughout is all kinds of wry humor and experiences like not having any modeling experience or serious aspiration to model and applying for America’s Next Top Model.
Her responses for that last one reminded me of my application for The Bachelor:
“‘What would bother you most about living in a house with nine to thirteen other people?’ (‘Not knowing more specifically the number of people in the house.’)”
Petri talks about how great stories come from times when things don’t go as planned and you end up looking like an idiot, and the fact that in the grand historical scheme of things we have solved so many big life problems that we end up worrying about things that are not exactly life-threatening.
“Embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers is literally one of the worst things that can happen to us,” she says. “It’s in the slot where polio used to be.”
Somehow we arrive at adulthood where other people see a person who looks like an adult and give us a frightening lack of supervision:
“The odd thing is that nobody stops you,” Petri writes. “I can rent a car. I can vote and walk into an office and — doesn’t anyone notice that I am secretly twelve?”
She has much more insight on our modern world and how we perceive success and attention, plus what it’s like to be a public writer — specifically a female one and the challenge of being judged on looks first.
Finally I have to thank her for sharing this take on Statuary Hall, which she says is her favorite part of the U.S. Capitol.
“Apart from Will [Rogers] and Bob [La Follette], my favorites were the statues from Hawaii — the big statue of King Kamehameha with gold trim that was always garlanded in leis, and the big boxy statue of someone called Father Damien who looked like a deranged refrigerator.”
This was one of those things I marked to go back and Google later just to see the picture, and I could not have been any more pleased with the outcome. Seriously, check out the Father Damien statue.