I wrote a piece back in April of 2023 about my habit of talking to strangers. Here’s a somewhat concise summary of the point of that post.

I like talking to strangers. I like meeting new people and learning something about them. Granted, most of my conversations with strangers are casually superficial, so it’s not like I’m learning anything important or meaningful about them or their lives. But the simple fact of meeting and having an idle conversation with random strangers tells me something about humanity in general.

And this is what I’ve learned: most people are pretty much okay.

That’s still true. Most people really are pretty much okay. A few days ago I found myself in Perry, Iowa, a small town of about 8,000 people. As my companion and I walked down the street, we saw a guy get out of a pickup truck, carrying a couple of small jars. One of which looked like homemade pickles.

I kind of leaned forward and grinned at the jar of pickles…and he stopped. He was delivering the pickles and some homemade cherry jelly to a couple of friends in a nearby shop. I asked if he sold his homemade goods, and he said, “No, I just give them to friends.” He asked, in a very kindly but curious say, what we were doing in Perry. I told him we were just walking around, looking at the town and its architecture, shooting photos.

He started talking about the town—how it had changed over the years, how it had fallen on hard times, and he started to get a bit emotional. I said something vague about how it was clear that he loved his town, and that sort of love was a wonderful thing. Then he left to deliver his goods.

We walked on. I stopped to take a few photos. And then the guy came trotting up to us. The friend who was to get the cherry jelly wasn’t in the shop, so he thought we might like it. This stranger, just because we’d chatted with him for a bit, wanted to share his jelly with us.

Randy Kennedy. He’d lived in Perry most of his life, and he walked with us down the street, giving us a history of almost every building and the people/families who lived/worked in them. The old shoe store owned by Greek immigrants, whose son was a hero in the Second World War. The French woman who ran a small diner/sandwich shop, and the various sandwiches she made, and how he and his friends would tap on a window and she’d sell them sandwiches through the window. The florist whose shop always smelled so nice. The building where the local newspaper had been printed and how he and his brother had been paperboys and they’d gather at “that door right there” and collect their papers, and how he was sometimes late in getting his deliveries made because he’d stop and get a slice of pie at another shop. He told us about two taverns with doors on opposite sides of an alley, one for hippies and one for farm folks, and how they’d drink together and argue politics in the 1970s.

As we walked and talked, other locals would drive by or ride by on bikes, and many of them would call out to Randy, and he’d wave back. He walked with us for maybe thirty minutes, telling us stories about how wonderful the town was, and how it was failing now, and how MAGA had created deep rifts in the community. He talked about the way the town felt increasingly divided, and had become less tolerant. He talked about the local pork producing plant that closed six months earlier, putting 800 people out of work. Eight hundred, out of a population of eight thousand.

He didn’t mention the school shooting that happened in January, leaving an 11-year-old boy and the school’s principal dead, and seven others wounded. Some things were apparently still too raw to talk about. But most of the shops—even the ones that were closed and empty—kept ‘Perry Strong’ posters in their windows, maybe claiming more resilience than the town actually has. Maybe hoping resilience would hold the town up long enough for some good news.

This guy loved his small town and was proud of what it had been and mourning what it had become. He was pessimistic about the future, but desperately hoped he was wrong. His love for the town was heartbreaking. He was sad, but said he was okay. That’s when I asked if I could take his photograph, holding the jelly he’d give us.

Like I said in my earlier post, most people are pretty much okay. In a lot of ways, being okay can be seen as a victory. Randy Kennedy may look a wee bit sad in this photo; he has good reason to be. And yet he’s basically okay. The proof of that is that he chased a couple of strangers down the street just to give us some cherry jelly that he’d made himself.

I talk to strangers. I will always talk to strangers. And this morning, I had cherry jelly on my toast.