My sister was sharing a story that she was outside planting flowers and an elderly man in a beat-up pickup drove into the driveway. He got out and, as she guessed, he asked for directions. She said years ago, they’d get people stopping all the time. It’s a confusing area with the lake, condos, and crossing streets with different names. Nowadays, most people have maps on their phones and she couldn’t remember the last time someone stopped to ask directions.

My sister said, “There is something about a stranger stopping, asking for help and then after a little small talk, he says thank you and have a nice day. Then he gets in his old pickup and drives away!”

I was thinking about her story and here are my observations—

First of all, he completely broke the guy code. Guys don’t ask for directions. He’s old and maybe his beat-up pickup was running low on gas, so he felt this time was an exception.

We’ve become afraid of strangers, haven’t we? All knowledge and power now is in a device in the palm of our hands. We don’t need others. I’m old enough to remember when directions were something like this – “Take the oil road to the Benson’s place, go down a bit until you see a big cottonwood tree, turn right. You’ll see a grove of trees and a tractor mailbox. That’s the Johnson place.” Now there are numbers and streets or avenues that take us to even the most remote of places.

It makes me wonder if sending immigrants back to their countries is a fear of strangers. We don’t take time to get to know them. They’re different and we don’t need them, so we want to send them back. Even if many are doing jobs that none of us want to do.

When I was an educator, I was trained and used the Boys Town Social Skills model. The basic premise is that many classroom behaviors and issues are from the students not having social skills. So teach them.

The response to “Thank you” isn’t “Yup.” Rather, look at the person and say, “You’re welcome.”

The response to “Have a nice day” isn’t an upward nod of the head. Look at the person and say something like, “Thank you. You too.”

Maybe strangers in old pickups can teach us something.

I was using my power washer this week. I’ve always had trouble starting it. For some unknown reason, this time I looked at the diagram, clearly printed on the side of the power washer. The picture showed the “choke handle position” for a cold start. Completely the opposite direction than I had always been using. I no longer wonder why it’s hard to start.

I’m still not sure about him asking for directions. But I bet he could start my power washer.