About 15 years ago, I was shopping in my local grocery store in Waynesville, North Carolina, when a man who once owned an antique store near my bookshop on Main Street offered me condolences about my wife’s recent death. Within two minutes, he changed direction and launched into an account of a sexual encounter he’d had in his store after hours. I will spare you the details, but about halfway through his narrative, he stopped, looking puzzled, and said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this story,” and then resumed his narrative. I was too polite, and too stunned, to intervene and tell him to cease work.
While he was speaking, however, I was pondering the same question he had raised: Why was this guy telling me these things?
