Being Stretched by Other People: My New Job. by risa
by Risa Dickens
In my new job I call up Montreal business owners and interview them so that I can write a profile about their place. Some are highly successful, some are high-end hoping for high success, and some are struggling. All are eventually excited to be describing their baby to someone who is not trying to sell them something. Once I make it past their understandable but tiresome suspicions, and they get that I’m just a freelancer getting paid to write an informative piece about them that will be published for free on the internet, we tend to have a good time. I’m not helping anyone really in need, but I do sometimes get to connect- like yesterday when, after three awkward and short phone calls interrupted by busy life and barking dogs, I finally spent some time talking to the elderly madame who runs a bed and breakfast on the South Shore of the St.Lawrence Seaway, just off the island of Montreal. She said things like “you’re a writer, do you ever write books about bed and breakfasts?” I said, “I could, I guess” and she said, “oh I wish you could see my house and my garden, I have 19 rooms to keep up here, you know, and I’ve seen it all come through these doors. I have had many immigrants with phd’s come here to stay, and once I had the mayor of Paris, I have all the documentation to prove it. You should come, and sit in my kitchen with me and I’ll tell you stories and you can write them down. People can smoke in the kitchen if they like, but not in the rooms. We used to let people bring pets, but they wouldn’t keep them in a cage and there were problems with pee pee.”
We laughed together, and she told me she wished she could see what I’d written, but she didn’t have the Internet. I told her, I guess I could mail it to you, if you really want, and she was so sweetly excited and delighted that she offered me a free night’s stay.
That small moment of excess (I mean how our interaction exceeded the limits of what I was being paid for) produced a small and happy glow in my head that’s been hanging around ever since. This woman went from being my toughest customer, the most abruptly defensive and anti-advertising, to being my sweetest memory of the job so far. She communicated in a wholly human way- going so far as to ask me “Who are you? Who are you really?” She poked me out of my telephone persona in the exact same way I’m always hoping to poke people out of business-owner-brain and into genuine communication.
I made mistakes in my interaction with her- it took me a while to understand that I needed to explain the whole idea of offering free information on the internet, and that I needed to speak clearly and slowly, before we could connect. I wanted to give up on our communication. I almost didn’t call her back that last time. It was a flip of the coin type choice that could have gone either way, and it’s success reminded me of that well-worn observation I heard repeated on TV the other day: That the harder choice always seems to be the right one. I wonder if the ‘right choice’ is hard because something in us is exhausted by the idea of the mistakes and repetitions and tangles that will be involved in interaction. I know that hardest part of my new job is getting up the oumph required to call strangers, and the best part is their surprising non-strangeness.
The second best part is how my mental map of Montreal is expanding. Yesterday, for example, I had to walk out to Parc Lafontaine along Rachel to run an errand. I’d walked this street before, but had almost no memory of it. I hadn’t been in to any of the shops, so they were all kind of a blur. This time I was surprised to run across two of the places I’d profiled. I was so happy to see them! They were real, they were even nicer then I’d imagined, and yet my profiles were quite fitting and so my communication with their owners (two very nice people) had in fact been successful.
It’s not my ideal writing job, but the way it’s challenging my spatial and interpersonal boundaries is very satisfying in its way. It’ll do for now.
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