For close to 20 years I've been an active member of our local food coop. I even have a job title: mailing and truck coordinator. Thus, four times a year, I drive over to the Wellington Fire Station to meet the distributor's truck and unload boxes of food. This means that every three months, in blizzard and in flood, the driver and I hang out together for 15 minutes. So we have gotten quite friendly while knowing absolutely nothing about each other.

Last Friday, as we were unloading boxes, I asked him how often he drove up to Maine from the distributor's headquarters in southern New Hampshire. "Once a week," he said. "Every week I head to a different region."

"That's a lot of driving around on bleak Maine roads," I said.

"But it's okay," he assured me, "because I have a good audiobook."

It turns out that recently, while driving along the glowering seacoast and desolate blueberry barrens of Washington County, he'd started listening to a history of the Comanches, "and now I can't wait to get back into the truck and learn more, like for instance, let me tell you about how they got their horses. . . . "

For the rest of the day, I felt downright jubilant. The next long-haul driver you pass on Route 95, that guy sitting up there in the cab? Well, that guy, he could be dreaming of the Comanches. Doesn't the picture make you happy?