Smoofy

An American man held a door open for me at Target. I was 30 feet away. He waited. Silently. Like a soldier holding a position. In Japan, if someone holds a door, you are right behind them and it would hit you in the face otherwise. It is not kindness. It is physics. This man chose to wait. I was so far away I had to jog. I did a small run. The awkward run you do when someone holds a door and you are too far to walk but too close to ignore. I said "Thank you" while breathing heavily, like I had just finished a marathon sponsored by Target. Then it happened. I held the door for someone else. A woman with a stroller. She smiled and said, "Thank you, sweetheart." A stranger called me sweetheart. In Japan, the last person who called me sweetheart was my mother. I was five. I had a fever. Now I hold every door. I held a door last week for six people in a row. I couldn't leave. I was trapped by my own politeness. I stood there for two minutes like a doorman who works for free. The sixth person said, "You're a gentleman." I have been holding doors for three months now. My right arm is visibly stronger than my left. My wife asked why. I said, "America." She did not ask further questions.

In Texas they told me to stop at Buc-ee's for gas. I have been to shrines. I have stood in temples that took two hundred years to build. I was not prepared for the gas station. There were one hundred and twenty fuel pumps. I counted them because I did not believe them. A man beside me was filling a truck the size of my first apartment, and he was not filling it because it was empty. He was filling it because he was here, and here is where a man fills things. Inside was a hall so vast I lost the horizon. A wall of jerky. A wall of fudge I did not know the country produced. A brisket sandwich handed to me by a man in a beaver costume. And I want to be clear, the beaver is not a mascot. The beaver is a saint. The people speak of him the way my grandmother spoke of the mountain behind her house. And the bathrooms. I had been warned about the bathrooms and I had dismissed the warning as the pride of a loud people. I was wrong to dismiss it. The bathrooms are famous across the whole state and they have earned it. I have slept in worse hotels. I nearly bowed upon entering. A janitor was polishing the floor with the devotion of a man tending a garden he loved, and when I thanked him he said "welcome in," which I have since learned is what Texas says instead of hello, and also instead of I am glad you exist. I went in for gas. I was inside for ninety minutes. I came out with fudge, a shirt printed with a joke I do not fully understand, forty dollars of jerky, and a feeling I can only describe as having been to church. I did not need any of it. I needed all of it. I have walked through the great cathedrals of the old world. I lit no candle there. I lit no candle at Buc-ee's either. But I did fill the truck. And I understand now that in Texas, this is the same thing.