The other day I waited in an auto repair shop for a brake job on my car. When I asked Ron, the man behind the counter, what it would cost, he said, “Is three something OK?”

“No,” I replied. ‘How about we make it two something? He laughed. I kiddingly added, “I’ll just have to cut two people off my Christmas gift list.”

I sat down and in walked a white-haired man wearing a large cross upon his chest. He made his business with Ron and sat appropriately 6 feet away from me.

“You can’t do a damn thing fixing these cars today,” he said. “Everything works off a computer and when that screws up, the damn thing doesn’t even drive.”

As a writer, I take interest in people I have just met so I moved the conversation forward.

“Well, now they have cars that drive themselves,” I said. “All you have to do is sit in the back seat and go for the ride.”

He shook his head. “Not me. I like to have control. I got to have the steering wheel in my hands.”

“Imagine sitting in the back of an airplane and there’s no pilot,” I said. “A computer is flying the plane.”

He looked out the window and I could tell his mind was going somewhere else.

“During the war, I flew in airplanes over the jungle to chart targets on maps,” he said. “We had this one old clunker plane that sounded like it was always on its last flight. They used to paint the thing so much I thought it was getting too heavy to fly. But here we go, flying just above the trees and the pilot is cussing about a loud noise coming from the engine. Sparks start shooting from somewhere. I’m in the back, charting targets when all of a sudden my map catches on fire.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I shouted to the pilot I’m gonna jump out of the plane! He screamed, ‘No, don’t do it!’?”

“So what did you do?” I asked

“I jumped out of the plane. I didn’t realize we were flying so low that when I pulled the cord on my parachute, it didn’t have enough air into it to open.”

“So what happened?”

“I slammed right into the ground and broke my leg.”

“Then what?”

“They sent a helicopter to pick me up. The Air Force once tried to get me to be a paratrooper. No way. I’m not jumping out of no plane unless I’m gonna have to save my life.”

His story was funny to me, but I knew not to laugh. His manner of tone was serious and even regretful. I could never put myself into his shoes that day in that plane in Vietnam. Yet, in some strange way his story was my story and your story and everyone’s story and it doesn’t matter if our stories have anything to do with airplanes.

He reminded me that we all have experiences filled with fears and failures. It’s all about the human condition; we are so fragile and so vulnerable. We wear masks, not the COVID kind; we wear the ones you can’t see on our faces that cover up our insecurities because we have to show the world that we got it together.

Everyone has a story to tell. If I ask someone if he or she would like to be the topic of this column, I usually get the reply, “Oh, no, I’m not interesting.”

Then I say, “Without knowing a single thing about you, I know that you are. Everyone is interesting. A man who worked seven days a week for 12 years without missing a single day is interesting. A school crossing guard was known as “The Wavy Lady” because she waved at every car that passed her place on the corner and your routine in the morning was to wave back. She’s interesting. That man stocking shelves in the supermarket takes groceries to three elderly people’s houses on his way home. He’s interesting.

The 65-year-old mayor of a small town and a woman who’s entered the Publishers Clearing House million-dollar giveaway are both interesting, too. He dropped an easy pop fly on the final play that lost his high school’s state championship baseball game. She’s entered the contest for 26 straight years and hasn’t won a thing.

Author Mitch Albom wrote, “No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”

I’d like to get to know what motivates a man to work every single day through a dozen flips of the calendars. The Wavy Lady didn’t know most of the people she waved to, but I’d bet she knew she was helping a lot of them have a better day with one swift motion of her hand. How did it come to be that the man delivering groceries got such a kind heart? How did a dropped fly ball motivate a crestfallen boy to become a mayor? Why does a woman keep entering a contest when she tells you she knows she’ll never win?

Albom ends his book, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” with these words “… each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

To borrow a popular phrase, “We’re all in this together.” This is life in one big book of endless turning pages, and we are the authors. We share our experiences with each other to find comfort in the human condition.

We are the story of one.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.