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Still more intriguing to me had been our bookstore lady, who’d gone out of her way to lie for no reason we could nail down. She’d lied so consistently that I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to her motivation. I can’t be sure if this was the case, but Benjamin did observe, “There are people who have a problem with everything, no matter what. They argue for the sake of arguing.” Yet even if this explanation fits, how would such people get through an ordinary day? Does that kind of argumentative nature confer a feeling of superiority, or do the topics of argument truly feel that important to the arguer? It might come down to control, a narrow focus on insignificant details as the only controllable things (e.g., no customer’s going to tell me what to change in my store). Or by sticking to the molehills and minutiae, one gains an excuse for not facing the difficult mountains that do loom outside the kitchen window. (Uncharitable persons might claim this about the TEAL mission itself.) Beyond our speculations, I fear I haven’t the insight to definitively draw back the veil. Hudson’s Miracle on Main Street fiasco returned to my mind then, but that hadn’t been arguing for the sake of arguing so much as it had been a desperate groping for authority (the makers of the sign must know better than any of us; the dictionary will tell us; here’s a woman I work with, know, and trust).

Not everyone had to react so negatively. I thought back to Hanover, where one guy caught himself passing the buck and took responsibility for it. He may not have created the typo, but he was there in the moment and could make the change happen. He’d even pointed out the brother typo of the one I’d caught, so we’d nabbed that one, too, working together. I considered that to be an excellent model to carry across life’s vistas of possibility. Who cares who made the mistake? I only care about how it gets fixed. Immediately following that one, I’d come upon the candy-store clerk, who turned a mistake into a teachable moment, the epitome of lemonade from lemons. At Molly’s, they’d rolled with our request so well that I had to revisit my thoughts about judgment, which Benjamin had shot down back in Chicago. While others might judge the mistakes and think less of a restaurant that had them, their response to our request had offered so much more vital information to judge them by. In showing such good humor and letting us correct the typos, everyone nearby feeling comfortable to join in the moment, they’d proven themselves. The very atmosphere that Applebee’s, T.G.I. Friday’s, and their ilk simulate in their advertisements actually existed here; we felt it. Thinking about it gave me a pang for Hanover like I hadn’t experienced even during my reunion.

Topping it off, though, was our Benton Shoe lady. That had likely been her own apostrophe, placing her with the many Americans who lack apostrophic confidence. In the end, though, what mattered most about her was her creativity and easygoing nature, as she casually made one of the most inspired typo corrections of our entire journey.

As if to screw the point deeper into the paneling of my head, the next two days offered almost perfectly symmetrical experiences. Once each day, we spotted a sign from the car, parked, and went inside the establishment to speak to someone. Both people we told used an air of professionalism to cut our interactions short. In spite of those surface similarities, the results were radically different. Outside The Derryfield, a restaurant and nightspot that my mom had patronized back in the day, an LED sign flashed a string of red messages, including one that advertised PRIME RIB NITGHT. We had to wait as it cycled through a couple times, timing the moment right to get the picture, which we used as our evidence inside. A hostess grabbed a manager, who said he’d fix it and then walked away. The curt nod punctuating his sentence let us know he’d heard us and that the interaction had therefore concluded. Had we been lied