I am very much an introvert, and my deliberately-set boundaries on social interaction serve to maintain my mental health most of the time. Sometimes though, you wander aimlessly into some sweet, singular moment with a random stranger and it's enough to fill your heart until the next rare and fleeting gift comes with someone else.
A man at my cousin's recent (fully vaccinated) baby shower was the son or husband of someone's friend or whatever, I don't really remember. But he had the most distinctive accent, definitely deep south but with this bouncy, skipping cadence and this really interesting and emphatic way of pronouncing Rs - I'm a linguistic/accent buff, by the way - like the way he said of the ultrasound that my cousin was showing off, "LOUk at that beautiful baby gOURl!" I even noticed him injecting Rs into words that don't have them, like the way he mentioned "Waurshing the car" to someone. I kept catching snippets of him speaking all night and was really curious to ask where he was from, but I'm shy so I waited until we ended up in the kitchen for more soda together.
"I have to ask, where are you from? I know it's the south, but I haven't heard any accent like yours before."
He turned from the ice cooler on the counter and winked and said, "You ain't the first person to ask me that tonight. Guess."
"Kentucky?"
"Close." And he cleared his throat and sort-of sang in that way people do sometimes, "almost heaven..."
And I got it in one triumphant rush and joined in, "West Virginia! Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah river, life is old there, older than the trees!"
He dropped some ice into his diet coke, nodded sagely, and said, "bay good, baby gourl," left the kitchen, and I never saw him again. That small, brief moment of human connection though, that's going to sustain me until someone else comes along to join me for a few steps on my way to the end. It was a good one.
