Solche Karotten Kaufe Ich Nicht

BY FRIDAY, the cold that first started making its gentle presence known two days earlier had taken a firm grip on my upper respiratory system and my sinuses. I'd spent the day at the office combining various over-the-counter cold remedies, which had helped to momentarily unclog the sinuses, but left me all cotton-brained in exchange. I left the office that afternoon in a bit of an uncomfortable daze.

I don't much remember walking to the train, and the ride home seemed unusually quiet. I was moving through a thick yellow fog, thinking that maybe a nap would be nice, perhaps even inevitable, when I got home.

After stepping off the train, I slowly dragged myself up the stairs toward the street. I felt like I was starting to come around a little bit, but not much. I kept my head down.

After hitting the intense sunlight of the surface world and lighting an ill-advised smoke, I found my path blocked by a human form. Lacking the energy or mental acuity at the time to take any immediate evasion action, I simply stopped and looked up. It was a young woman, probably somewhere in her 20s.

"Hello," she said, and at once I heard the accent. "May I ask you something?" That's when I determined she was German. Or maybe Austrian.

"What," I said. It came out sharper than I'd planned, more like a command than a question. I didn't want to be overly rude, but I wasn't feeling well, and was a bit suspicious about this whole thing. There'd been too many people like this out on the sidewalks these past couple years. She didn't have a clipboard in her hands, and wasn't wearing the telltale yellow Greenpeace shirt. She also wasn't wearing the tell-tale red, white and blue shirt of the "help us get Bush out of office" people. She certainly wasn't a Krishna. Maybe she just wanted directions, I thought, or a handout-though to be honest, she'd have a hard time convincing anyone that she was homeless. Yeah, it's probably just directions, maybe to the bad German restaurant down the street.

"I am needing to talk to you," she continued with an almost conspiratorial urgency, taking my elbow as she spoke and leading me off to the side.

"What," I repeated. It had only been a few seconds, and already my patience was growing slim. My patience tends to grow slimmer than usual when I'm not feeling well.

"My name is Helga," she said.

Helga? I was thinking, as I shook her small outstretched hand. Then she launched into her spiel. I was lost immediately, and began scrambling to catch up. She was talking too fast for my muddy brain, her accent seeming to grow thicker the more she spoke. If she'd spoken German I might've done okay-but she insisted on speaking English-or a broken form of it-with that godforsaken accent. She could've used some subtitles.

I stared at the ground focusing what was left of my energy on trying to parse the words and decipher what it was she wanted. Was it change? If it was directions, where to? Maybe it was a scam of some sort. I listened hard for something, anything I might pick out and build from. A word or a phrase that made sense. There was nothing. As doped up as I was, understanding clear and simple English was hard enough. This was impossible. Impossible, at least, until the final sentence.

"So would you then like to sponsor a child?"

"Oh!" I said, snapping upright, thrilled-overjoyed, even-at having understood something, at finally being able to put it all together. "No," I told her with a relieved smile. "No, I wouldn't."

"Oh," she said, sounding mildly crestfallen. Then, perhaps as the result of some cultural difference I was unaware of, instead of just accepting my response, letting me be on my way, and stopping the next sucker who stepped out of the subway, she asked: "Why not?"

She was asking me why I wasn't sponsoring a child? She didn't have brochures, a clipboard, anything-she's just some German chick standing on a street corner-and she's expecting me to agree just like that to sponsor some damn kid somewhere?

("Maybe she was the child in question," Morgan suggested later that evening.)

Apart from the above questions, in my torn shirt and torn pants, did I honestly look like someone who could reliably sponsor a child? Jesus.

"I guess," I told her, "that I'm just not a very nice person." Normally these days I try to be a very nice person, but not when I'm feeling poorly and just want to get home. But that was the wrong answer to give, and maybe one she'd been hearing all too often. Whatever the reason, it prompted her into another prepared spiel. This one was briefer, however, and since I now knew what we were talking about, I could mostly follow it.

"But this is not about being a nice person or not," she insisted. "This is about being human." She dragged the last word out like a condemnation.

"Yeah, well, I guess you can take it as you will," I told her, and that seemed to do the trick. I stepped around her and kept walking. Behind me, I heard her corner the next sap who was coming out of the subway.

Once home, I unpacked my bag and turned on my computer. Before napping, I had one small thing to take care of. Earlier in the day, I'd done something I'd been meaning to do for a long time-I finally backed up all the files on my office computer onto one of those fancy, new-fangled zip discs. I'd never done that before. I had seven years' worth of stories here, only a fraction of which ever made it to my computer at home, and almost none of which had ever been saved elsewhere. One kaboom in the office machine, and they'd all be gone. It had happened to me once before back in Philly, and as a result, a year and a half's worth of stories (my only real memory of what I'd done down there) are now gone, gone, gone.

I popped the disc into the home machine and shifted everything over. There. Now I had the security of having them all in three different places. They were safe-unless of course the power went out.

Just to check, I opened the "1998" file to see how things looked. Everything seemed to be there and intact. Christ, there sure was a lot it. Some of it was okay; quite a bit of it was crap. But there sure was a lot of it.

Sometimes it presses in on me hard that I've been doing this for over 17 years. I opened the "1999" file next. Hundreds and hundreds of these little electronic snippets. I'd brought home seven years on a piece of plastic that could easily fit into my pocket. There was another 10 years before that to consider, too. Thousands of them-some just a few paragraphs long, some a couple hundred pages. I've never bothered ever trying to count how many stories that might be altogether, and didn't think of trying then. I did, however, start to wonder-not with pride, not with anything, really-how in the hell I pulled it off.

Then I decided that I'd see what kind of a story I could dredge out of that minute-long encounter with a German chick on the sidewalk, and with that thought, I was beginning to close in on an answer. o