Lesson Learned, Pun Intended

On my lunch today, I sat alone in a sandwich shoppe underneath the office buildings on Bloor Street. I don't mind eating by myself, it gives me time to think and I like to watch people and imagine where everyone is going to or coming from in such a hurry. I noticed an elderly gentleman sit beside me, but I didn't make eye contact because I didn't want him to engage me. I was enjoying my solitude. But he did. I could barely hear what he was saying, it was rather loud where we were, but he began by complementing my shirt.

"My wife wore polka-dots to church once..." he mumbled, I didn't know what that had to do with anything. "Do you play the piano?"

"Yes, why?"

"You look like a piano player."

"And how exactly does one look like a piano player?" What a strange question.

"You look smart. And creative. There's also something about your posture."

And on he went, talking, talking, talking and I attempted to humour him and listen, but I really wasn't in the place to be talking to strange, elderly men. He mentioned Shakespeare, and how he wrote about Shakespeare once. I asked him if he was a writer.

"I consider myself more of a poet. In England, my first published work was when I was eighteen." I didn't believe him. He was quite thin, his face wrinkled and sunken-in, and his clothes looked like he had slept in them for days. His beard was uneven, long sporadic hairs protruded from beneath his shirt and his eyebrows stuck out further than his nose. My first impression was that he was homeless. After a while of feeling intensely uncomfortable, I excused myself to head back to work. He introduced himself to me as Paul Bailey, and I made a mental note to research that name to see if he really was who he said he was.

I immediately looked him up when I got back to the office and the name can up several times, including a picture. His was much younger in the photo, but it was clearly the same man I had eaten lunch with. It turns out, he was being modest about his accomplishments. Paul Bailey was the first-ever recipient of the E.M. Forster Award and won a George Orwell Prize for one of his essays. He is considered an influential writer, and is still publishing work today. I found the following quote which affected me tremendously:

I write because I have to and want to. It's as simple, or as complicated, as that. And I write novels specifically because I am curious about my fellow creatures. There is no end to their mystery. I share Isaac Babel's lifelong ambition to write with simplicity, brevity and precision. It was he who said 'No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.' I hope one or two of my full stops have done, and will do, just that.

He is "curious about his fellow creatures", as I consider myself to be. Maybe this is why he started a conversation with a perfect stranger: To learn something. But instead of learning from him I brushed him off. I immediately judged him. When I discovered what this man had accomplished, I felt such shame for how I had treated him. Not just because he is a great thinker and I could learn from him, but because it demonstrated an enormous flaw in my own character. I acted as if I was somehow better than this man, that I had more important things to do with my time than listen to his chatter. I would be lucky to have a conversation with someone like him, and who knows how long I'll have to wait before meeting someone as brilliant ever again. I would be lucky to accomplish half of what he has in his life.

It's a cliche, but my lesson of the day: Never judge a book by it's cover.