Personal essays
Anticipating the game being played
Sometimes a cigar
In Granada, near the Cathedral, older women will wander up to you offering you a free sprig of rosemary.
It’s free.
Actually, it really is free, but you don’t want to take it.
It’s kind of funny, I’ve been listening to Eliot Gould read “The Big Sleep” and there’s a scene that is just like that. One of the characters offers Marlowe a cigar.
Marlowe nods and the other man tosses him a cigar. While Marlowe reaches up to grab the cigar, the other man reaches into the cigar box and comes out with a gun that he points at Marlowe.
The cigar was free.
Building the broth
The ladies in Granada don’t pull a gun on you, but if you accept the rosemary they grab your wrist.
They turn your hand over and begin to read your palm to tell your fortune.
That isn’t free.
Maybe you’re willing to pay, so you offer them a Euro coin or too.
No, they tell you, coins are bad luck. They need paper money.
It’s stone soup.
The man who shows up at the miserly woman’s house hoping for a meal and tells her we can make it by boiling a stone I picked out of your garden.
She agrees.
He tastes it and says, “It’s good, but it would be better if we could cut up an onion and add it.”
And ingredient by ingredient he creates a rich soup and discards the stone before they eat.
No response
Marlowe looked at the gun and ignored it. But that takes nerve and not all of us are hardboiled detectives with a liquor bottle in the top drawer of our desk.
The guide books warn about the women and their rosemary.
They say the best thing to do is to shake your head and say “no gracias”.
For me, after years of spam and phishing emails, I’ve learned it’s best not to reply.
I had a friend who prided himself on responding to all of the fake emails with nasty notes back.
All he showed them was that there was a real person at that address who might not fall for this scam but might fall for the next one.
As each woman approached me with the rosemary, I kept my hands at my side and avoided eye contact. Sometimes I shook my head “no” as I passed by.
The women aren’t bothered any more than the people who send thousands of emails. It’s a numbers game, they hold out their rosemary to the next person passing by.
You don’t have to get very many five euro notes an hour to make the effort worth it.
It’s a game.
Sometimes the only way to win a game is to not play.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 287. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe