nutmeg

Recently I was at Jewel, slowly deciding between buying the Jewel-brand nutmeg or the name brand nutmeg, both of which were astoundingly expensive for being tins of smelly powder. It must have been winter because I was wearing my puffy coat, the one with a little tied-yarn doll dangling off the zipper.

A man standing nearby was also inspecting the spices, but he kept turning to stare at me and my chin. I didn't understand why - I had forgotten that the dangly was there - until he said, slowly, "Hey, where did you get that?" I realized what he was pointing to and said, "Oh! In New York, just at a booth." What I said didn't make much sense, but it was enough to start a brief chat.

I said, "Are you familiar with these things?" He said, "Yeah, you see them all the time at comic conventions." I said, "Oh, are you a sci-fi kind of guy?" He said, "Well yeah, sci-fi, fantasy, you know." I said, "I went to ComicCon last year in New York! It's always nice to meet another geek!"

Of course, our conversation didn't go quite as smoothly as this, because we were both geeks, but it was nonetheless pleasant, and the memory of how the conversation ended has been pleasantly obscured. It can't have ended not awkwardly. I remember being surprised because I could count the number of black comics nerds I saw at ComicCon on the fingers of one hand.