Between one set and the next, I pulled a book from the shelf to help me ponder. The topic of the day, broadly defined, was: why do we expect people to match with old stories, why can't we just see what's there in someone, why must we all map to a legend?

The book I grabbed was a classic mythology text, one I'd made sure would be handy because, well, it has any number of great old stories. Being a textbook, it explored the question of where all these stories come from, from whence their power derives. I'd thought there might be some insight there into how we all seem to wind up as dizzy blondes, stern fathers, den mothers, mysterious strangers, or some other quickly-uttered phrase.

Major theories about the origins of the classical myths - Hercules cleaning the stables, Perseus besting Medusa, and all those gigs - can be categorized thusly:

• Scriptural - it's all a pretelling of what the Bible says,
• Historical - it all happened, but the tales grew in the telling,
• Allegorical - it's an abstraction of some common event, told in a way that sounds literal,
• Physical - it's a way of coming to terms with all the air, water, fire and earth we see,
• Philological - it's all a confusion of what terms really mean, among all the speakers and the spoken-to, all down through the ages.

With the frame of mind I was in, with the last of my liquor losing the battle in me to the cold, something tried to crystallize around all these ideas. The mythology of our civilization and the mythology around our companions may be but different facets of the same thing.

Perhaps we're all created such that we tend to see new people as our own old myths. They step into the roles old ones left, into the stories our minds have refined.

Perhaps we take those broad categories from the black-and-white movies too literally, and expect people to really be what they are at first glance. Plucky schoolmarms, avuncular priests, gypsies with the second sight, what-have-you.

Mere rocks and whirlpools we find along our way get magnified. Perhaps for all of us they become slavering monsters with the passing of time, with the telling and retelling of the stories to ourselves. The act of filtering it into words corrupts it, but maybe in a way that simplifies.

Really, where's the problem with filing folks in bins named Scylla or Charybdis? When you recognize someone as being of the rock you foundered on, or of the waves that rocked your cradle, you have to act on that. You have to treat them as if they were the thing you know. People call that learning, they call that experience, they call that smart. (If you blurt at the one in front of you that which you'd wanted to blurt at the one who is gone... well, they call that therapeutic in some circles. Just sayin'.)

There's a value to having that mythology of your own, knowing to shun Loki, believing Valkyries will carry you away if you show the right kind of valor. It's pro-survival to dodge the airhead blonde, to dismiss the mama's boy, to not go off with the man who has candy. Saves you time, saves your skin, points you toward a response that can work.

I think most classic mythology grew up out of that: it's the versions best expressed of the things that all should know. Perseus is telling us, the would-be heroic boys, to be indirect about staring at really amazing tits. We won't freeze up, she'll be without her best defense, and we'll stand a much better chance. Arachne tells us to be less boastful about how we do our work, or we'll wind up as something people want to step on. Few of these little words to live by are valueless, if you leave them as broad sweeping guidelines.

All that, I think, contributes to answering "why". By analogy from classical to personal, there's a reason why we have mythology, why we see in new people what we saw in the old, why we look for that two-word description. Despite that there stems from this atrocious things - racism, sexism, bagism - he said ism ism ism - regardless of this, there's a level on which to not do this is stupid, and it's never a good move to expect stupid from yourself or others.

If someone speaks to you as they would that avuncular priest, as they would that sepulchral lost love, you have to respect that they saw something in you, that there's something within you that chimes. Regardless of the annoyance of getting messages for the dead, or being asked to become what only movies might be, you have to accept that there are archetypes in you.

Where they, or we, might fall into error, is in thinking the primal story is all of the story.

It's bad to not note that the blonde retains detail, that the too-hot librarian is trying to read. The man who has candy might just miss his children. The girl with the tits? She might just have some needs.

I've been smiling through handshakes for too many years to think comrades must know all the details of me. I purse lips, adjust glasses, because they expect it - it's part of my story - they see what they see.

The people I've known let me see that as healthy, a duty we take like the steps of a waltz. We stick to the forms so we know where our hands go, stay with the steps so our feet don't fall false.

One shouldn't abhor it, or call it a hindrance; disdain it for all of the truth it forestalls. Without a good frame, there is no good picture - if there's nowhere to hang, we can't see it at all.

Anyway. Anyway, anyway, anyway.

Some first glimmerings of all this had begun to occur to me, while I waited for the second set. (I eventually left before it happened - had I seen clearly then how much this issue related to tits, I'd have hung around.) One part of the whole conversation was overwhelming all the rest, and had me quirking a grin as I shelved all these thoughts to simmer.

When people see me in character, I'm effectively their plumber. They speak of problems getting things from here to there, need instruction on how things roll downhill. That's the archetype that's found me, or at least that's what I see in how people behave around me.

How magical it must be, to be instead a creature out of fable. The conversation this piece extends began with a friend. The one who gets the blurts intended for that long lost love, the one who gets heartfelt outpourings with her morning coffee, over and over. I was lost for a time in considering how living like that must feel.

There was only one conclusion I could come to.

I've got to believe that it's fabulous.