The other night, I went to a fabulous dinner with my friend Lauri and was going to go to a party with Rob afterward except I found out that he did not want to go to the party after all. He invited me to come over and bring a movie, so I went to rent a movie, and that is when I ran into Adriana.

Adriana is a lovely and extremely friendly Guatemalan woman who lives and works in my neighborhood. It recently occurred to each of us that we saw each other on the street a great deal, so we began to have conversations. When I saw her last night, she had just emerged from the video store as I was about to go in.

Now, I must reveal that I occasionally project the vibe of being helpless when talking to people I do not know well. (I get the idea that people I do know well also feel that I am helpless, or even hapless, but for entirely different reasons.) It is not that I am actually in need of assistance, it is simply that helplessness is a somewhat modest conversation generator that can be habit forming. So when Adriana asked me what movie I was going to get, instead of saying, "I am going to rent a suspense movie" (which was indeed my intention), I said, "Oh, I don't know. I don't rent movies very often, so I don't know what's out there. I'll just go in and look around and maybe find something good."

And Adriana said, "I'll come in and help you pick something out."

And indeed she did.

Adriana is a big movie fan and had apparently seen most of the store's offerings, so she was full of suggestions. She was so anxious to be helpful that I did not have the heart to tell her I wanted to just pick up a Hitchcock film and run out. She put tape after tape into my hands and explained to me her system for choosing between several desirable movies. Finally, I allowed as to how I might want something a little suspenseful or scary. With that to work with, she went immediately to the shelf and handed me Stir of Echoes, a movie I indeed had some vague desire to see. I grabbed Torn Curtain on my way to the counter, and we checked out.

Then I went over to Rob's apartment and watched Torn Curtain, but that is a different story.