"How do you think it's all going to play out?"

I went for a late lunch at Harry's Pastrami Shack on Route 9 in Westborough. I like going around 2:30 in the afternoon because my favorite booth is open and I don't have to feel like a hog sitting there all by myself because there are plenty of other places available.

Walking in, I notice a man who reminded me of Mr. Clean from the old commercial sitting at the table next to "my booth."

My "Mr. Clean!" got a smile in response.

My plan was to have some lunch and read a few pages of Dmitry Orlov's essay: Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century. I was in the part where he says that "an equally useful quality in a crisis is apathy," when my mind was being drawn to the conversation between Mr. Clean and a couple at the counter.

Counter Guy: "People complain about having to reset their clocks when there's a power outage. (On the TV they were talking about the storm in Denver) But it's much more serious when it's much more serious."

Mr. C: "Big changes in the weather."

Counter Guy: "the spring was worse with all that rain. I work for a pool company and we couldn't put in the pools. We were down $100,000 in receipts by July and there's no way you can regroup after that."

Later, and after Counter Guy leaves, I say, like out of the blue: "how do you think this will all play out?"

He looks at me and I say: "with the weather, the changes."

Mr. C: "Ya don't know. We haven't been there before."

I start talking about my previous posting about climate change and talk about Jim at Big Bear, California (he knew it instantly - I could see him 20 years ago growling up the mountain on a good old fashioned hog) and Laura in Sasketchewan. He listens attentively.

He tells me about how there was "flowering going on, on the north side of PJ Rhodadendruns; 6 months early."

He then goes on talking about the melting arctic ice shelf and how that's all fresh water and how it will upset the current (that circulates from the North Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico and then up the Eastern seaboard of the States.)

You really have to wonder how this is all going to play out.

For my part I liked how I got into the conversation with the elevator pitch of "how do you think this is all going to play out."

His comment of "ya don't know, we haven't been there before" is incisively spot-on

The other thing I took away from this conversation was how easy it actually turned out to be to "get at" what was going on beneath the surface with the right question.

He offered his hand, we shook and I left.