We needed to get the car washed.

We’d been camping at Bruce Peninsula, two hundred and eighty kilometres or so away, and some of the back roads were dirt. We went on a long country drive one night. I’d looked at the rearview to watch a big smudgy cloud of dust billowing up behind us. Alex smiled, said sorry — he’d picked the road — because the scenerey around us wasn’t as interesting as he’d hoped. And a few days ago, there was a torrential downpour. We went to the movies that night, but the road next to a cornfield was flooded, and we were soaked by muddy water. The car was filthy. It was supposed to rain that day, but the car really needed cleaning.

It was a weekday, so ours was the only car at the wash. Instant service, roll right up. The old guy taking the ticket had been pacing slowly with his hands behind his back, his head down, at the entrance to “The World’s Longest Car Wash!”, and when he saw us, he snapped into life and guided us in. Little left, little right, on the track, thumbs up, we’re in. We really got the treatment, being the only ones there. Before sending us in, the old guy brushed down the windshield, washed the tires, and hosed off most of the dirt from the hood. Nice. He remembered something, hurried to my window and started gesturing, but I knew what he wanted. I rolled the window down to hand him the car wash ticket.

“Thank you, Sir,” he said, with what sounded like a Greek accent.

“Thanks,” I said. There was a fine spray from the machines coming in, and I closed the window quickly. He pushed a few buttons and the track pulled us in, and we got our lovely wash.

Something wasn’t really right.

This man, this car wash man, was about seventy years old. Apart from his car wash overalls, he looked neat and trim. He had all his hair, and it was cut nicely, combed perfectly. His short moustache looked meticulously groomed, and he wore gold round-rimmed glasses. He looked like a librarian, or a writer, or an antique shop owner. And he called me “Sir”.

That was the problem.

Everyone calls me Sir. The kids checking me out at the all-night grocery store, or the liquor store guy, or the gay guy helping me pick out a shirt, I’m “Sir” to all of them. The army of waiters and waitresses that have been serving me since I turned eighteen, the bank lady, the guy who keeps calling my office trying to sell me financial products, the book store clerk, the harried girl working the returns desk at the downtown Canadian Tire, all of them say “Sir”. I’ve heard it countless times over the course of adulthood, and every time, it’s moved through me as meaninglessly as “Mister”, or “Fella”, or “Hey you”.

But hearing this old guy say it? Who’d just finished brushing down my car, who started the track that pulled the car into the machine? Hearing this older car wash man addressing me like that, when I’m maybe twenty-five years younger than he… it wasn’t right.

I started wondering why he worked there, what circumstances led to him hosing off cars in front of The World’s Longest Car Wash! for what could only be minimum wage. Maybe he was a bored retiree who’s wife was gone. Maybe he needed the money. Yikes.

But a different question is, why on earth is he going around calling the likes of me “Sir”? Well, because I’m the consumer. The ultimate aristocrat in an ostensibly classless society. My ten bucks not only gets my filthy car as clean as the day I picked it up at the dealer, it also confers on me titles, and dignity, and unfounded unearned respect, and other such social paraphernalia that, were it to suddenly be taken away tomorrow, I would surely notice, and probably miss. Oh, I am surely part of the consumer aristocracy.

Yes, there surely is something dreadfully wrong with that.

No, I’m not “Sir” to him. Not “Sir” any more than I should be called “Your Excellency”, or some other such nonsense.

I’ll bet he’s got stories to tell. He’s been around, certainly. He himself, with his careful grooming, his perfectly trimmed moustache, has the comportment of someone with great dignity. He had a nice face. Not particulary kind, not care-worn either, or menacing. Ordinary in a carefully groomed, resigned sort of way.

I detected an accent, Greek perhaps. Hard to say how long he’s been here.

I’m done with notions of romance and common heroics and so forth. That’s for young men, as Plato (or someone) said. But, there’s a weak and romantic part of me that can imagine him against the sky, on the water, the waves lifting and lowering a little slip he’s on. The wine-dark sea, as they say. Because the sky’s light — even though it’s dusk — he’s darker, more of a shadow. Maybe he’s sixteen, maybe twenty-six. His elbow’s bent at a right angle behind him because his hand is resting on the rudder’s handle. There’s an old torn net on the floor of the slip. He’s looking out against the water, where it disappears into the horizon, where you can’t see anything else. The sound of the waves is calming, for now. There’s nobody else around. He might think, A moment like this, out here, where there’s a job to do, where noone else is helping you, where the slip is part of the water, and you are part of the slip — a moment like this lasts forever.

Louis General Greek