Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
Always Know Where You Are
Perhaps it is because I have been a man of the world, so to speak. I think my parents went on a business trip of my dad’s shortly before I was born and so I was Born to Drive, so to speak. From going down the Mississippi River on a raft with my cousins and brother Tim when I was 15-years-old to hitchhiking around the country as a college student or hopping a freight train to Seattle with a group of friends including Janet and Tim — a shout-out to them since they are Hues subscribers — and hitching back home via San Francisco and hitching back and forth between Milwaukee and Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi where I attended college for two years and then there is the travel to Mexico and China. And there was the time spent on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in eastern Montana.
My guiding light was always know where you are and what you don’t know. In other words, be present at all times and don’t be tripping off into some fantasy that the world revolves around me and so I could do and say what I wanted because I was the center of the universe.
If I had that attitude, I would have been dead a long time ago or at least lost forever in a world of my own making.
When I started hitchhiking, I would always engage the person who was graciously giving me a ride — if for no better reason than to keep him alert and awake — in conversation, often asking them question after question until I found a common bond or ground that we had together. And I can honestly say that after hundreds of these rides — all the way through the thousands of interviews that I have conducted — that there is always a common ground that we have as human beings.
But given that understanding, it would be downright disrespectful to think that since we have that common ground that we are all the same and so therefore everyone is like me. This is how you slip into that I am the center of the universe place that only exists in your imagination.
And so I always worked hard to understand where my world — discerned with my five senses — began and everyone else’s worlds began. And within that space, we all had a right to be in it.
And so it was always important top know where I was in terms of geography and with the people with whom I was sharing a space.
I needed to know geographically because one time when I was hitchhiking and was getting dropped off somewhere in Kansas I believe, the guy who had given me the ride tried to convince me that north was east when I was going east. But I had been paying attention all along and knew which way was east. So after he set me up to go north and he had disappeared, I maneuvered to go east. I remained headed in the right direction because I paid attention.
And I also learned about people because I was present with other people instead of living my own particular fantasy at the time. When I was visiting my son Andrew in China when he was there for several years teaching English as a Second Language, we were walking the streets of Shanghai with a friend of his Summer.
We were walking near the Huangpu River near the business district when a man approached us with merchandise to sell and we hurried along because we weren’t interested. The man spoke in a harsh tone in Mandarin with Summer. After we had gone a ways, I asked Summer what the man said. Summer said that he was basically chastising her because she is Chinese and she should have been helping him sell his merchandise to Andrew and me.
It was a simple, but profound moment that let me know some of the pressures that could be placed on Summer because she was with us. And it was another of life’s lessons on human nature that I would have missed if I had been in la-la land just observing the beautiful architecture around us or had been on some mental trip where I was the star in everything going on around me and actually being oblivious to what was going on around me.