There’s an elderly man who sells jugs of wine for about four dollars at my local market and doesn’t speak English. He sits in the first stall of the indoor market hall and listens to Hungarian news on his radio. Two liter seaglass-green jugs line the walls behind him. You can bring back your empty jugs and he will wash and reuse them. He accepts your card but prefers cash; his card reader is slow and doesn’t always work. Ever since he taught me how to properly say “Merry Christmas” in Hungarian, he greets me with a smile and a lilt of recognition in his weathered voice.
Around the corner from the wine guy is the produce guy. Some of the vendors in the market only have a few tables or a stall; this man has a whole room. I don’t like cabbage very much, but I’m always tempted to buy it from him because he stacks it in such nice pyramids. He is younger than forty and plays house music by the cash register, which is entirely his own proclivity and not an appeal to his patrons, who are often older. He sings along as he weighs my onions.
The woman who owns my most frequented coffee shop is the kind of person who could have her own clothing line or work for British intelligence and no one would know. She has notable earrings, a stringy-haired black dog, and a death stare. When a frazzled pair of customers came in for coffee the other day, she didn’t flinch at their request—two lattes with different levels of milk-frothing and three ice cubes in a separate to-go cup—or their exasperated huffing, directed mostly at her. She took their defiance in stride and gave it back, but subtly. I’ve also seen her field questions from an overeager undergrad who spent thirty minutes trying to ask if she could set up an internship project about composting in small-scale cafes. I love the little cube of a world she’s created. Sweet breads sliding in and out of the oven in the course of an hour. Dog politics working themselves out as new terriers follow their owners inside. I think I am nothing like this woman, but I’m glad for the space that she offers.
I was talking on the phone with a friend who has known me since high school, which is to say that she has known different phases of me. She is among the people who have the most “evidence” about who I really am. She started wondering out loud if the people who only see a fragment—a couple minutes spent paying for vegetables—see any less of the “real you” than the people who have watched you grow up. Because if realness comes from frequency, I am more real to the coffee shop owner than I am to my cousins in California. Even if you define realness by how much someone knows about you, it’s surprising how much the peripheral people could infer. The coffee shop owner knows what I sound like when I’m making work phone calls and personal phone calls. She knows how much I’m trying (or not trying) to order in Hungarian. She can probably guess that I live less than a mile away.
Those are all situational facts that say something about the kind of person I am. It goes both ways. I am sharing the fabric of my life more than I imagine with the woman who walks her two border collies on my street every day, or the man with the blue jacket and warm smile at the flower stand. Even the kind woman at Fifth Third in Breton Village who has helped me with every international banking roadblock I have encountered—maybe especially her—deserves some credit. The relatives or friends who know my birthday and my major and my family structure might not be able to guess what I’m making for dinner, but the produce guy could. I’m not saying I would choose him over my Aunt Nancy as a desert island companion. I’m just saying I probably overestimate what it means to be known.
Michal graduated from Calvin in 2022 with a major in writing and a minor in global development studies. She’ll be working with a refugee resettlement organization in Hungary for the 2022-2023 year. She is always up for a spontaneous trip to the closest beach.
