Every so often in my store I’ll see someone who looks like they just hopped back onto the world after falling off twenty years ago. This most recent guy, he’s got the second greatest mullet I’ve ever seen. It’s big and puffy, business in the front (and, from the looks of it, business has been better), party in the back (more like morning-after-party in the back, but hey), but the streaks of gray in it signal that perhaps the party ended a few years ago and no one told him. He’s got a mustache. Worse, a bad, scraggly, having-and-mustache-because-fuck-you-I-want-a-mustache mustache.

That’s not even the weirdest. This guy buys something and pays with a check so I have to see his driver’s license. The one he gives me, one of the new holographic Minnesota ones, has the clip in the lower right signaling that this dude had been cited for a DWI. Between Miller and Bud, I bet this guy is a Bud man. Thing is, behind the license, in his wallet, is another license, one of the old red and white ones. And that one’s clipped too. Long out of date, yet he’s saved it, like a memento. His son makes a comment about how his hair looks weird in the picture, and he says it’s because, back then, his hair had been longer. And the guy standing in front of me, me in the present, his hair in 1984, has hair down to the middle of his back. And it’s wiry; he’s proud of that mullet, too proud to let it go, but he’s not even taking good care of it.

And this guy is wearing rings on every finger, but gold and silver things like iron crosses and skulls; real biker stuff. Real, don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I’ll-put-these-through-your-teeth stuff. His fingers clink together as he opens and closes his wallet, takes the bag of stuff from me.

But the best part, the best detail, is this: he’s wearing a black jacket with red leather sleeves. And monogrammed over the right breast, in varsity cursive, is the moniker “Little Hitler.”

Seriously.

After he left, I asked my co-worker if he’d seen him too, just so I could be sure I hadn’t imagined it.

There is a man with one leg in a wheelchair inching himself stoically around his usual circuit of the shopping mall.

I saw him today, and it was first time in over a year.  Years ago, when I worked at a nearby store, I would see him, pushing on the wheels only lightly with his hands, letting his one remaining leg do most of the work, folding back and forth like a lever.  He propels himself, his head not looking down, but not looking up–scanning the midlands.  The pants on his abbreviated leg are bunched up and tied in a cluster where his knee should be.  He does not hid the injury, doesn’t fold the pants back to mask to absence.  Instead, he makes it prominent, not to show it off, but I imagine to make a point of not hiding it.  When he’s scooting along, he’s all business.  But his eyes are always scanning.  I remember once, years ago, on my way to work, I watched him to a second too long, and his eyes met mine.  I don’t know what I expected but I didn’t expect him to smile so largely.  A smile like that is more contagious than the flu.  I forget the brief words we shared, but I do remember walked the rest of the way to work feeling very happy, pleased, glad to have even briefly shared those words with him.

When I saw him today, he pushed himself along and passed me without looking up.

I don’t trust labels.  I like to have an idea of what I’m getting myself into when I take something off the shelf, or when I invest in a friendship.  Labels, ideally, give us an idea of what we’re going to find when we open the thing up and see what’s inside.  If there was no label, would we ever open the anomymous bottle?  Labels help us circumvent some of that uncertaintly because we can see, before you even pick it up, weigh it in our hand, compare it with our budget, what we’ll get when we take it home.  But labels are often incomplete, all of the ingredients are not listed properly, the nutrition facts are all wrong, what’s good for you is bad for you, what’s bad for you is good.  Some people, they’re like whiskey in a water bottle.  On the shelf, they look fine, healthy, good for you, but open them up and it’s like drinking fire for breakfast.  Other people, they’re just the opposite, water in a whiskey bottle.  On the shelf, they look tough, mean, the bottle a fuck-you shade of dark brown, obscuring the color fo the liquid within, big bold lettering, not to be sold to minors.  But, break the seal, open them up, and what you find is sometimes refreshing, welcome, sweet.  In a world where labels are incomplete, misleading or outright false, we have to be willing to open those strange, angry bottles and drink what’s inside, and also, when we taste the whiskey in the water bottle, we have to have the courage to give up that label, replace the cap, and put it back on the shelf.