the man who clocked my drying rack at ten paces
There is a man at the Sunday market who has now, three weeks running, come over to my stall just to tell me I'm drying my prints wrong. Not buying. Not asking. Just stopping to inform me that the washing line arrangement is inefficient and I should be using a proper rack with clips, the kind he uses for his own hobby, which is model trains.
I stood there holding a sheet of paper that had been soaked in the Atlantic and left in the sun for eight hours and this man wanted to teach me about clips.
The thing is, I smiled and nodded. I always do. I nod and let them talk and it costs me nothing and I hate that I do it, I hate the politeness of it, I hate that my mother raised me to be accommodating to men who have opinions about my craft that they arrived at without ever once doing it.
I didn't say that the line is how it's done, that the clothesline is part of the process, that the paper curling in the salt wind is the whole point. I just said "hm" and handed his change back.
I have been thinking about it all week. Not the man. The nod.
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This is the thing about people who work with materials that don't fight back. Model trains stay where you put them. Paper has its own mind, and the way it dries changes the way it takes pigment, and no clip on earth fixes that. Eight hours in Atlantic air, he wouldn't know what to look at.
The nodding and smiling, I know it well. It's not weakness, it's economy. You get one or two sentences of actual value out of ten minutes of that man, and sometimes you don't even get that. Costs you less than the argument would.
But I'll tell you what I've learned to do after years of it: I stopped nodding all the way. Now I nod, and then I say, "Interesting, I'll think about that," and I go back to what I was doing. It's the same cost to them, but it's a little more honest, and it keeps the day from feeling like you're being slowly sanded down.
"Paper has its own mind" is right, and the drying is part of the making. I've spent thirty years fighting the curl in a sheet of Arches that was perfectly flat when it went on the board and refuses to be anything else once it's off. You learn to read it, which way it pulls, where the tension sits. That's not something a clip tells you.
And you have my sympathy on the nodding economy. I teach occasionally and I've found there are two kinds of interruption: the one who asks a real question and the one who has come to deliver a lecture. The lecture always costs the same, so I've stopped paying full price. I thank them, I take the one useful sentence if there is one, and I let the rest go past me the way it should.
The Atlantic at least gives you an honest answer. Trains don't. 🙂
The Arches thing is real, I know exactly the one you mean. It never forgives you. You learn to coax it, and some days it lets you, and some days it just decides. But you can feel when it's giving in, and that's the part nobody clocks from the outside.
And the lecture economy, yes. I've started charging them in my head. This one owes me about twelve euros by now. He hasn't paid and I don't expect he will.
"Paper has its own mind", yes. That's it exactly. It's alive until it isn't, and the drying is part of the making, not a chore between one step and the next. Someone who's never watched paper curl and settle and decide could never understand why you'd want it that way.
And you're right that nodding is economy. I've started to think of it as a kind of patience with a purpose. Their certainty is free to them, so it costs me nothing to let it pass by. But I'd be lying if I said I'd stopped nodding entirely, I'm still learning the difference between listening and just being polite while someone talks at me.
The retired engineer and his white. What did you end up saying to him? Genuinely curious whether you found the words or just let the white speak for itself. 🙂