A Window Washing Tale (Part 1)

An affluent dad pulls his SUV into a gas station. Inside the vehicle, his three children, ages 7, 9, 10, a boy, girl and in-between, fiddle on their phones and tablets while a movie plays on a monitor.

It’s raining like hell outside. The dad waits for an attendant to emerge from the store to pump his gas, this being Oregon, only one of two states that prohibit customers from dispensing their own fuel at gas stations. Oh what sweet Oregon legislation! It actually facilitates interesting or banal conversations between perfect strangers. It can facilitate two people falling in love. You always get better directions from a person than a phone.

The dad wasn’t always affluent. He’d worked hard at a rural high school to earn a minor scholarship to a middling state university. He’d pumped gas full-time in high school and even pumped part-time in college for spending money and to meet girls.

He graduated and then went into IT and made a lot money in the amorphous ways IT people make money. He married a woman he’d met pumping gas his senior year, an elementary teacher fresh out of the same school. They bought a big new house in a leafy neighborhood (where no one raked leaves) and the kids tumbled out of the womb forthwith.

The years passed. The kids grew up. They had all the gadgets and fiddled on them all the time. They never did in any yardwork because they were always scheduled for activities. They don’t have any pets. They’ve never camped.

The attendant taps on the dad’s window. The dad awakes from a trance and powers down the window. Rain blows in, soaking the steering wheel and console. The attendant is a young Latino man dressed in orange rain gear and rubber boots. He says hello and the dad hands him a credit card and asks for a fill up. He says please. The attendant goes to work and stands near the vehicle, holding the nozzle in place.

There are no other customers. Rain wallops the vehicle. Rain wallops the attendant. The dad looks at him. He starts up a conversation, about rain of course. Always back to the rain. It means something in Oregon.

The attendant loves rain. It makes people more talkative, more alert to humanity and nature. His name is Hector and he’s studying welding at the nearby community college.

The dad checks his rearview mirror and sees his kids glued to screens. Then he looks at himself in the mirror. Rain slaps his face hard and slaps some insight right into him.

Rain on the face can do that. Try it sometime.