There's a middle-aged guy in my wine class, one who is talkative and opinionated, but has enough knowledge and sense that those two traits don't get on my nerves so much. I don't always agree with what he says, but he says it eloquently enough that I don't automatically go into eye-roll mode whenever he opens his mouth. He wears an eye patch, which has nothing to do with his thinking abilities, but the fact fills me with curiosity and wonder. I suspect that his eye patch is not treatment for a lazy eye, but rather a cover of something horrifying and tragic. I can't decide what would be worse, an empty socket with a concave eyelid covering it, or a horrible and mangled bit of flesh. My intense desire to know more about what is hidden underneath that little black patch was only heightened when I noticed he was missing half a finger on his left hand.
Unfortunately, there is no good way to ask, "So, uh, got anything underneath that there eye patch?" In fact, to find that sort of thing out, it appears that I would have to become very close friends with this man, and I'm afraid I'm just not that interested.
One night, a couple of us were trying to find out the name of the eye patch guy, since Eye Patch Guy isn't really appropriate or even clever. None of us knew him well enough to know his name, much less to find out just what happened to the rest of his finger and the rest of his eyes. So another man, Clyde, asked a woman sitting next to him, "Hey, what's that guy's name over there?"
"Which guy?"
"Uh. The, uh, guy, um, you know, over there. With the...cream sweater."
Okay, so he was the only guy in a cream sweater, but there were a lot of other descriptors that would have narrowed down the field much more quickly and efficiently. But no, we're polite.
And I still don't know the guy's name.
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