I rarely ever go to a laundromat--here they're called washaterias--but I recently washed some rugs at Lollie's washateria and Thursday I was back again to wash a quilt. I baby my washing machine, so heavy things and rugs go to the washateria.
Lollie was out for lunch, but a man sitting in his pickup truck saw me getting the laundry basket out of the trunk of my car and came to help. I use walking sticks, so any help is welcome. (But this is how I normally manage laundry baskets. I loop a belt around the rim of the basket and can pull it along.) So this fella came in with me and put the quilt in the washer, added detergent and put in quarters. He said he was waiting for his clothes to finish washing, and sat on a table and we started chatting.

Every person is a walking story book; every life is novel worthy. I'm a good listener, and I ask questions, and people want to talk about themselves. That's the way it is in small towns down south. First you try to establish bonds of commonality, like do you remember so and so or do you know so and so.
This man, Wally, told me he was 50 years old, and unmarried. He had been married once, divorced, and had no children. He works for a shipbuilding company and had quit his job twice over the years and withdrawn all his IRA's etc. both times. Now he's trying to hold on and keep his job, which can be dangerous and out in the elements, until he's old enough to retire.

Then he started telling me about a girl he knew when he was 20 years old. She was very popular and dated all his friends, but refused to date him though he was madly in love with her. He said "I handled it wrong. I pestered her to marry me and she got tired of it and we had a fight and she dumped me. Then the very next guy she dated, she married. They had a son."
He looked pensive and said "That could have been my wife, my son, if I had just handled things differently. I still call her mother every now and then and we talk and she tells me how her daughter is getting along."

As he talked it was painfully obvious that Wally was mooning and pining over a failed romance of 30 years ago. He hadn't moved on. He thought of himself as a failure because a girl had rejected him. He thought his life would have been perfect if he had that girl. He was engaging in magical thinking. I wanted to take him by his ears and shake him.

I said "Well what if you'd married that girl and started fighting right away and she dumped you then? What makes you think you'd still be married now and living in blissful lala land? That's not the way life usually works out. You might have been a lot more hurt if you'd married her."
But reality checks can't work against such ingrained thinking. He was kind and sweet, but he had pinned all his troubles on a failed romance decades past. Sigh.

susil