I'd begun to realize that I didn't know nothin' about nothin', which I suppose was doing pretty well, for someone with a penis and less than eighteen years. I sat in the passenger seat of the natural-gas-fueled F150, saying nothing at all, but not quite looking straight ahead.

My eyes were following the man assigned to watch me that day, to keep me from killing myself, wondering why we weren't getting to it. The morning's work was to include a potentially failing transformer, a chicken farmer upset about his bill, and several miles of the wire depicted in the books of draftsman's maps beside me.

The man who'd soon be driving the truck rarely used the maps. He'd been up and down the county so many times in the service of the electric company that he seemed to know where each pole was set, and remember every jackleg repair involved in stringing three phases of four / ought wire up and down those hills at 7200 volts apiece.

We were going to be busy that day, but there I sat, waiting with cooling coffee for him to finish up inside the family-named general store. The woman behind the counter kept him leaning there and smiling as she talked and waved her arms, and I gradually just decided to be patient. When the guy who'd been watching me the previous week, my "regular boss", had heard who'd be driving me while he was away, he had smiled just a little and said nothing. A few moments later he added, "Don't try to meet all of his friends in one week." I was beginning to understand what he'd meant by that.

I was a peach-fuzzed clod of a boy, who knew he knew nothin' about nothin', and so I watched that man with many friends as he devoted his attention to the lady. After all, I was working that job for the summer to learn. I couldn't figure his technique, or derive the algorithm, though I noticed the lady watched every step he took back to the truck, and that he grinned down toward his coffee as he took them.

"Sorry," he said as he climbed into the truck, his grin widening for a moment. He went about the business of maneuvering the big yellow truck out onto the road, as I waited for him to say more. "I guess you know her," I finally prompted.

The smile came back as he let that question go by, and replaced it with one he liked better. "You got a girlfriend, Frank?"

"Yeah. Well, kinda." She and I were breaking up because I was getting a little tired of the way that she fucked - but in that truck, with that well-befriended man, my reply sounded to both of us as if I'd never touched a girl. He nodded slowly, letting himself be amused just a little at the college kid's expense.

"Well, if you want to keep her, listen up, and I'll tell you everything you need to know about keeping women. Pay attention."

I sat up straight and looked over at him, with the face I used for being the teacher's pet and learning something. (I didn't yet have any other face for that sort of occasion.) His smile showed more amusement as he let the silence hang.

"Did you get that?" he eventually clarified. "Pay attention."

I probably blushed as I realized what he was saying, and I did my best to copy his nod as he laughed. He said, "I'd not talked to her in a while, and we're not meeting anybody at the first stop. Doesn't matter any if it takes a few more minutes to get there. Anyway, look that place up on the map for me while you're sitting there." That smoothly, we moved away from the topic of how well he knew that woman, and into teaching me about the mapping system, and on into the rest of the day.

I thought about that cold coffee the last time I drove through that place. (The general store is now a convenience store, part of a chain that uses the same barcodes everyone else does. I remember they used to load blue tape into the pricing guns.) I wanted to turn to someone and tell them the story as I drove, but as is usual these days, I was riding alone.

It struck me that I've been kind of hiding out lately, keeping to myself, forgetting the lesson he gave me back then, back there in that place. If you're reading this, and if I'm very fortunate, you've noticed that about me lately as well. Maybe it's because I'm not out going up and down the county these days, I dunno; maybe it's just been hibernation. Really, I still don't know nothin' about nothin'.

I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me.

So. Let me lean up against something and smile, and I'll let you talk for a while.

How ya been doin'?