Approachable

I had to cold-call an icon yesterday.

Okay, so it wasn't an actual, like, call. I availed myself of email. But I still had a question that I had to ask of a well-known and much-admired writer. The last time I spoke to this fellow I was in my twenties and didn't know yet how much I didn't know, and he even at that time had such a reputation and following that he was part of "what people knew" about Nova Scotia, even people who would not be caught dead reading a book.

So I wrote my note, drawing on two tiny threads of relationship, and I asked my question. And, lookie: the fellow wrote back right away! He provided a thoughtful, friendly, and open-ended answer, just as if he wasn't famous.

This is, of course, not the first time I have had a gracious response from a famous person. As a teenager I wrote a letter to novelist Arthur C. Clarke about a point of science in one of his novels, and I had a faint typewritten response (because the typewriter ribbon was near the end of its days, not because the text was timorous, which it was not) within a week, all the way from Sri Lanka (and possibly typed on that custom typewriter that he had with the added blur key that he could use when uncertain whether the word was spelled "i-e" or "e-i").

I keep having to re-learn that lots of accomplished people have not let fame go to their heads: they have not become aloof and snooty and unapproachable, If that's how they are, that's probably how they were when they were more nobody than I am.

What happens is that I let their fame go to my head; I set up importance-barriers around accomplished folks that they generally have had no intention of setting up for themselves. I probably miss some very interesting conversations that way.