Being New Somewhere, Even If You've Been There Before

My best friend's mother died on a Wednesday, and I drove ten hours to be at the funeral for approximately sixty minutes, which seemed, when I was explaining this to a friend, like the kind of thing that requires more justification than it actually does.¹ The math is straightforward once you've decided to do it: the drive is the point, not the obstacle to the point. You don't attend a funeral because it's efficient. You attend because there is a person at the center of it who needs to see your face, and your face cannot be transmitted over Zoom, or at least not in the way that matters.

Though I should be honest that I'm not entirely sure I went for Michael's sake. It's possible I went because not going would have told me something about myself I didn't want to know. There is a distinction here that feels meaningful, but I couldn't tell you how.

I took Highway 395 south from Reno, which is the old road, the one that runs through the eastern Sierra past small towns that don't seem to have updated their relationship to the 21st century much, diners and bait shops and motels with hand-painted vacancy signs still shaped like arrows. I've driven 395 before, but never with this particular quality of nothing-to-do-but-look-at-things. I stopped for diner mug of coffee in a town that I'm not sure had a name on any map I'd trust, and the woman behind the counter asked where I was headed, and I told her, and she said "long way," which was both an observation and a kind of sympathy, and that was the whole exchange. I've been thinking about that exchange. Though I've also been wondering whether I would have registered it at all if I hadn't been driving toward something that mattered, and whether the exchange was actually what I keep making it, or just a woman saying two words because it was something to say to a stranger at 11am in the morning and you're a woman pouring a diner mug of coffee.²

I checked into a hotel in that night, a little further north than I needed to be but chosen deliberately to shave just over an hour off the drive back. I know Southern California well. I lived there for years and have the muscle memory of the freeways and the specific quality of the light in June, which is marine-layer soft until about eleven and then something else entirely. Walking through the hotel lobby I passed the unexpectedly full bar. A bank of screens above the liquor bottles was showing the World Cup, June 20, and the crowd had organized itself into loose national clusters in the way people do when they're watching something together: a table that was loud in Spanish, a man in an England kit sitting alone with a beer and the particular stoicism of someone who has is waiting to be disappointed by his national team, yet with a kind of peace in it, and a group near the back who were speaking something I couldn't identify and who did not appear to be drinking but were the most intensely focused people in the room. I stood there a moment longer than necessary, watching this accidental assembly care about something that had no overlap at all with why I was there.³

What struck me, standing there in the lobby with my backpack, was the quality of attention in the room. These people were fully inside what they were watching. Wherever they'd come from, whatever version of America they'd arrived with, the thing on the screen was real and present and demanding everything they had. I was the one who wasn't quite there. I was preoccupied with tomorrow, which is reasonable, but it meant I was passing through a room full of people being completely present and registering it only as background noise. I filed it under "hotel bar, World Cup" and went upstairs. I didn't think about it again until much later.

The funeral was the next morning. My best friend's name is Michael, and his mother's name was Ruth, and she had been ill long enough that the loss was expected and still, when it arrived, managed to be a surprise. I've known Michael since my second year of college, his first, and Ruth was always the peripheral presence: "Hi Rich!" from wherever she happened to be in the house when I'd show up to collect him, and then she'd be gone. In maybe twenty years I had perhaps two conversations with her that exceeded five minutes, both of them while waiting for Mike to appear. She was the kind of person you remember precisely because she paid attention to you in the brief time available, and then whatever else needed her had her.

Michael is Jewish, and his family practices in the traditional way, and I had never attended a Jewish funeral before. The entire service was graveside, outdoors, which meant the California June sky was part of it, and the particular smell of dry grass in San Diego county, and all the sensory information that the walls of a funeral home are specifically designed to exclude. There was no organ. No flowers. No cushioned pews. Just people standing around a hole in the ground in the morning air, which is about as honest as a ceremony can get.⁴

Before the service began I watched the family perform kriah, the ritual tearing of a garment, which is the most direct expression of grief I have ever seen in any formal context.⁵ You stand up straight, because the tradition requires you to demonstrate strength even here, and you tear the fabric near your heart, and the tear is left open for the duration of the mourning period, so that the wound in the clothing and the wound in the person are on the same timeline. I watched from where I was standing before I understood what I was watching. The sound is not something I'll describe. Partly because I don't think description serves it; partly because I was standing at the edge of it and not inside it, and I'm not sure I have the right to render something in language that isn't mine to be inside of.

The casket was pine. Simple, unfinished. The idea behind this, I learned later, is one of the most democratic in any tradition I've encountered: in death, all are equal, so the vessel is deliberately plain, and the body returns to the earth at the same rate regardless of what the family could have afforded. The rabbi spoke. There were prayers in a language I don't speak. Michael delivered a eulogy with a composure I can only describe as ferocious.

Then people shoveled. Not ceremonially, not the symbolic motion of one obligatory scoop. Actually shoveled, until the casket was covered. The shovel was inverted for the first pass, the back of the blade facing down, which signals that this particular labor is reluctant: necessity is different from willingness, and the ritual makes a point of honoring that distinction. The shovel was set back in the pile between each mourner rather than passed hand to hand, so that grief would not transfer accidentally.⁶

Someone near me moved toward the pile at some point, and I felt the impulse, and then didn't act on it. I've told myself since that this was a form of respect, that there's a version of attending that means staying at the edge rather than inserting yourself into the center, and I think that's probably true. I also think it's possible that I didn't know the rules and was afraid of doing the wrong thing and froze, and then afterward constructed the version where I made a considered choice. I'm not sure those two explanations are mutually exclusive, which is its own kind of uncomfortable.

I drove home the next day thinking about the back of the shovel.

The 2026 World Cup is distributed across American cities in a way previous tournaments rarely are, which means the hundreds of thousands of international fans who've descended on this country aren't just visiting New York or Los Angeles; they're renting cars and driving to games in Kansas City and Dallas and Philadelphia, and discovering that the space between those cities is enormous and strange and apparently riveting. The documentation of these road trips has been its own viral phenomenon. Someone from Tokyo discovers a Waffle House at 11 PM and needs to sit in the parking lot for several minutes to process what has happened. A group of English supporters films themselves walking through a Bass Pro Shops and struggling to find words for what they're seeing. Germans (and I keep coming back to the Germans in these accounts, because their documentation has been particularly methodical) stop at a Buc-ee's in Alabama, which is a gas station the size of a regional airport with 120 fuel pumps and an on-site brisket smoking operation, and eat breakfast sandwiches in the parking lot off a bag of feed corn they bought inside at 6 AM, and seem to regard this as one of the more transcendent experiences of their adult lives.⁷

What matters is not the novelty. What matters is the quality of attention.

Which is an easy thing to type, and I've now typed it, and I notice I feel slightly better about the whole thing as a result. I don't entirely trust that feeling.

There's a psychological concept called the contact hypothesis, developed in formal terms by the social psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954, which proposes that direct contact between members of different groups, under the right conditions, meaningfully reduces prejudice between them.⁸ The hypothesis has accumulated something like five hundred studies in its support, and the basic mechanism is not complicated: when you stop encountering people as a category and start encountering them as specific individuals who do specific things in specific ways, the mental shorthand you've been using to represent them tends to disintegrate. This is why the tourists stopping for lunch deep in the American South keep posting the same observation, articulated a hundred different ways: the people they meet are so much more particular and real and warm than the version of America they'd brought with them. The contact is doing what contact does.

And here's what I keep thinking about: the contact is doing something for us too, even though we're mostly not the ones initiating it.

There is a well-documented phenomenon in perception research called change blindness, which describes the reliable failure of human beings to notice even significant changes in a visual scene when they're not specifically attending to it.⁹ You see this in the famous experiments where someone is replaced by a different person mid-conversation and the subject, who was busy with something else, doesn't register the substitution. The brain is ruthlessly efficient; it stops processing inputs it has classified as familiar and stable. The remarkable becomes invisible not because it disappears but because your brain has made the executive decision to stop looking.

I had been to funerals before the one for Ruth. Several. And I had arrived at a settled, half-conscious model of what a funeral is: the dark clothes, the organ, the flowers, the casket that costs more than most people's cars, the brief committal at the grave where a few symbolic handfuls of dirt are sprinkled before the real work is done later by professionals with machinery. I'd stored that model under "known" and stopped updating it. Then I was standing outside in the June air watching a man tear his shirt, and the model had a tear in it too, and I was suddenly attending not to my expectations but to what was actually in front of me.

This is what it feels like to have your category reopened. Not comfortable. Not uncomfortable either. Just accurate, in a way that settled categories are not.

I didn't know it yet, but the people in the hotel bar the night before were having the same experience in the opposite direction: their categories for America reopened by everything they'd been finding since they landed. I'd walked past them without seeing it. Same condition, different angle.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political philosopher who visited America in 1831 and produced one of the most sustained acts of attention to this country anyone has ever attempted, observed something in Democracy in America that seems more accurate to me now than when I first read it.¹⁰ He was writing about the tendency of democratic people to become intensely focused on private life, on the immediate, on what is proximate and familiar, in a way that produces a certain narrowing. You get very good at your specific corner of the world and gradually less attentive to everything outside it. He thought this was a structural feature of democratic life, not a personal failing; the equality of conditions means everyone is absorbed in their own project, their own improvement, their own family, their own career. The communal lens atrophies from disuse.

What Tocqueville couldn't have predicted was the internet, and specifically the particular internet phenomenon of the summer of 2026, where people from elsewhere are pointing their full foreign attention at the country I've been ignoring from the inside. The German road trippers have been to Jordan-Hare Stadium at Auburn University, and they are standing in the parking lot with the stunned expressions of people who have just encountered something that recalibrates their category of "college sports" entirely. Auburn, to be clear, is a mid-tier SEC program by any objective metric. The stadium holds about 87,000 people. The tailgate culture around it is a form of social organization that makes no sense if you've only ever seen European football, where the stadium is often in the middle of a city and you walk to it from a pub. But here the stadium is the center of something; the whole infrastructure of a small Alabama city organizes itself around the eight Saturdays when it fills. The Germans understand, in a way I haven't thought about in years, that this is objectively bizarre and also quietly wonderful.¹¹

I find myself having to do some honest accounting here, because my instinct is to read all of this with a mild superiority, the way people who grew up near a famous landmark sometimes feel a quiet condescension toward tourists who wait in line for it. Of course Buc-ee's is extraordinary. Of course there's something worth photographing about the way American gas stations sell beef jerky by the pound and have private prayer rooms and require their employees to wear shirts that say HOWDY. I know this. I just haven't been paying attention to it. And there's a meaningful difference between knowing something and having your attention structured by it, and the people currently flooding the internet with footage of their confused joy are showing me that I've been confusing the two.¹²

The honest accounting, if I'm actually going to do it, has to include the question of why. I live in this country. I've lived in it my whole life. I've had thirty-some years to look at it with the quality of attention I'm currently praising in tourists who've been here three weeks. I didn't. I required a dead friend's mother and a ten-hour drive and a hotel bar full of strangers to begin the process of asking what I've been looking at all this time. This feels less like a lesson. It feels closer to an indictment.

The reports that keep circulating are not primarily about the food, though the food is everywhere in these accounts: ranch dressing, cheese curds, brisket. And deep-fried things that apparently require several minutes of silent processing before a person from Stockholm can fully metabolize what has happened to them. The reports are about the people. This is the constant refrain, the thing repeating itself across languages and nationalities and football allegiances: the people are kind. Extraordinarily, almost disarmingly kind. And the visitors are careful to distinguish this from something else, to draw a line around it precisely: this is not about policy or administration or what was in the news this morning. It is specifically not that. It is about the woman at the diner in rural Indiana who refilled (a concept already blowing minds) the coffee three times without being asked and stayed to talk about her daughter's school play, and meant it. About the mechanic in Tennessee who figured out the rental car's weird European phone connector and refused to charge for it. About the men at the feed store who spent forty-five minutes helping a confused group of Swedes understand why you'd want to buy a bag of feed corn at a gas station, and seemed delighted to explain.¹³

I want to pause here. I want to really recognize the precision of that distinction. These visitors are not naive. They come from countries with their own relationships to American foreign policy, their own ambient impressions formed by decades of exported movies and news cycles and political rhetoric. They have a version of America in their heads before they land. And then they land, and they drive through it, and the version in their heads turns out to be a different country than the one where the woman refills the coffee. Those two countries coexist on the same soil. The tourists are encountering the one that doesn't travel overseas. They are encountering the one that stays home and works and talks to strangers and means it.

Here is what I think is actually happening, though I could be wrong, and this is one of those observations that feels true in a way that significantly outpaces my ability to defend it: the encounter works because the foreignness is visible and admitted on both sides. The visiting fan from Tokyo is visibly not from here. They know it. You know it. And so the social friction that usually operates in domestic encounters, the friction of assuming shared context and then discovering you don't have it, gets bypassed entirely. Both parties enter the interaction knowing they're starting from nothing in common, which paradoxically produces more genuine exchange than interactions where both parties assume they already know each other.¹⁴

This is the opposite of what we usually believe about familiarity. We assume familiarity lubricates social contact; the people you already know are the ones you can relax around. But there's a certain kind of attention that only appears available when familiarity isn't an option. The stranger who stops you to ask about something you've walked past a thousand times is making you see it again. They're borrowing your eyes for a moment and returning them to you slightly recalibrated.

I keep returning to the German contingent at the Buc-ee's because their account has a detail I can't ignore. They describe eating brisket sandwiches in the parking lot at some unreasonable hour of the morning, using a stack of feed corn bags as a makeshift table. And what they describe is not tourism. It's not "here is a funny thing we found." It's closer to gratitude. They're describing something that produced in them the feeling of having accidentally stumbled into the real version of something. The authentic thing rather than the performed thing. Not the America of movies or political arguments or international coverage, but the one that's just there, doing what it does, at a roadside travel center at 6 AM.¹⁵

The revelation requires a certain orientation to the world. It requires being new somewhere, or finding a way to be new somewhere even if you've technically been there before.

There's a concept sometimes called beginner's mind in Zen Buddhist practice, formalized in the West largely by Shunryu Suzuki in his 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and the core idea is that the expert's familiarity is both their strength and their limitation.¹⁶ In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few. The expert has correctly identified all the patterns and can navigate them efficiently. The beginner keeps noticing things the expert has stopped seeing. The beginner is, in a very specific way, present to things the expert has already filed away.

What I've been watching this summer is a massive unplanned experiment in applied beginner's mind, conducted by tens of thousands of tourists who had no choice but to be beginners, deployed against a country that had largely forgotten what it looked like to someone who'd never seen it. And the results are joyous, if you're paying attention.

I was a beginner at that graveside. I didn't know the prayers. I didn't know the language. I didn't know the choreography of the shovel or what the pine box meant or why standing straight while tearing cloth was a form of dignity rather than defiance. I was in the condition the tourists are in: receiving the real version of something rather than my stored version of it. And the real version, it turns out, was better than what I'd had filed under "funeral." More honest. More deliberate about what it was asking of everyone present. The woman on 395 who said "long way" was doing the same thing in two words: offering the real version of an encounter with a stranger, unmediated, because there was no prior relationship to perform through. All three of these, the diner counter in the high desert, the bar full of people from everywhere, the grave in the June air, were the same invitation. Be where you actually are.

Re-reading that sentence, I distrust in proportion to how good it sounds, and it sounds pretty good to me right now, and I've been sitting with it trying to figure out if it's true or if it's just the shape that a certain kind of experience takes when you run it through the filter of wanting to have learned something from it.

The tourists keep finding something at American diners and gas stations and stadium parking lots is the country in its unmediated form, before the filter of news cycles and political representation and whatever else gets between the actual people and the image of them that travels. And what they keep saying, with a consistency that is impossible to dismiss, is that the actual people are good. Warm and specific and glad to have you and meaning it.

That the country contains this, has always contained this, and mostly just needs the right kind of attention to become visible again, is not a small thing to know going into the rest of the summer.

The lobby bar in was, in retrospect, its own small version of what I'm trying to describe. A man from England finding whatever peace he could find with a beer while expecting a familiar disappointment. A group from somewhere I couldn't name watching a match with the total focus of people for whom the stakes were real. Strangers from a dozen countries arranged around the same screens in a hotel that exists at the intersection of three freeways and serves primarily as a waystation. Nobody performing anything. Just people, from all over, being exactly where they were.

I stood in that lobby for a few extra minutes before going upstairs. I didn't know it was a thing worth standing in yet. I think I do now, or at least I know it in the way you know things that required someone to die before you'd look at them, which is a different kind of knowing than I'd prefer to have. But probably the only kind I was going to get.¹⁷

¹ The colleague eventually said it made sense. But there was a beat before she said it, during which I could see her running the arithmetic, and the arithmetic troubled her for a moment before the human math overrode it. I think the arithmetic-to-human-math conversion time is a reasonable proxy for how much time someone spends in institutional rather than relational thinking. ↩︎

² The 395 corridor through the eastern Sierra is not a road people tend to write about with the reverence given to, say, Route 66, which is partly because it still actually functions as a road and hasn't been fully colonized by nostalgia tourism. Bridgeport, Bishop, Lone Pine, the towns just existing there, doing what they do, the same way they've been doing it since before anyone thought to photograph them as Americana. ↩︎

³ I thought about whether to go over and say something to the England man. He seemed like he might have benefited from company. I didn't. This is a decision I've made at hotel bars before and will probably make again. I'm not sure it's the right one. ↩︎

⁴ There's something about conducting grief outdoors that removes several layers of the performance a funeral home supplies. The carpeting and the filtered light and the regulated temperature are all doing work, and you don't realize how much work until they're absent. Outside, the sky doesn't adjust to the occasion. The grass doesn't either. You're the one who has to adjust. ↩︎

⁵ Kriah (or Keriah) is performed while standing, which the tradition specifies because standing represents strength at the moment of grief. The tear is made on the left side of the garment, over the heart, when mourning a parent; on the right side for other immediate family. The torn garment is worn throughout the shiva period. The logic is not metaphorical but almost engineering-minded: if the wound is real and ongoing, the outer sign of it should be too. ↩︎

⁶ The prohibition against passing the shovel hand to hand is one of several Jewish mourning customs built around the idea that grief is not something to transfer accidentally. You set it down. The next person picks it up deliberately. The protocol acknowledges that what is being managed is real and heavy, and does not pretend otherwise. ↩︎

⁷ Buc-ee's largest location, in Luling, Texas, is 75,000 square feet, roughly 1.7 acres. It has 120 fuel pumps, operates its own on-site brisket smoker, and won the Cintas award for Best Restroom in America in 2012. That last detail is the one that most recalibrates first-time visitors, because it means a structure the size of a regional airport has solved a problem most regional airports haven't. ↩︎

⁸ Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice formalized the hypothesis, building on policy discussions around post-WWII desegregation. The 2006 meta-analysis by Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, covering 515 studies and roughly 250,000 participants, found robust positive effects of contact even when it didn't meet all four of Allport's conditions, which is the result I'm pointing at here. ↩︎

⁹ Change blindness is distinct from inattentional blindness, which is failing to notice something outside your attentional focus entirely. The classic inattentional blindness study is the one where subjects counting basketball passes fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the frame. Change blindness specifically describes failure to detect changes in things you are ostensibly already watching. Both suggest that most of what we experience as "seeing" is actually memory and expectation, with sensory input filling in the gaps. ↩︎

¹⁰ Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831, nominally to study the prison system, and wrote 900 pages about democracy instead. The narrowing he identified was not a moral critique; he thought it structural, a function of equality rather than selfishness. When no one is above you and no one is below you, the work of managing your own position becomes all-consuming. The communal disappears not because people stop caring but because they stop having time. ↩︎

¹¹ Jordan-Hare Stadium holds 87,451 people. The total population of Auburn, Alabama, is approximately 78,000. The stadium holds more people than live in the city that built it. I say this not to make a rhetorical point but because it is a fact I repeat every chance I get. ↩︎

¹² The philosopher Michael Polanyi distinguished between focal and subsidiary awareness: you can be subliminally aware of something without having brought it into focused attention, and the distinction matters for what you actually know about it. His example was a blind man's cane: the man is focally aware of the terrain ahead but subsidiary-aware of the cane itself. Most people have the same relationship to their home country. Subsidiary, peripheral, relied upon without being examined. ↩︎

¹³ I want to be careful not to sentimentalize this into something it isn't. American hospitality in small towns has a real history and it isn't uncomplicated. The warmth visitors are encountering is not evenly distributed, and the version of America being documented in these posts skews toward particular kinds of travelers moving through particular kinds of communities. The observation about kindness is real. The context around it is also real. Both deserve acknowledgment. ↩︎

¹⁴ There's a concept in literary theory called defamiliarization, formalized by the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, which describes the artistic technique of presenting familiar things in unfamiliar ways to restore felt experience to them. Shklovsky thought this was art's primary function: not to convey information but to restore sensation to things we've processed into abstraction. The tourist with a camera and a social media account is, inadvertently, doing this to the country I live in. ↩︎

¹⁵ The brisket at Buc-ee's is smoked on-site, freshly chopped to order. I know this because I've eaten it, on a road trip, in the car, moving. I didn't experience it as remarkable. The Germans in the parking lot at 6 AM, eating on a feed corn bag, experienced it as remarkable. We ate the same sandwich. ↩︎

¹⁶ Suzuki's book was published in 1970 and remains one of the more useful things I've encountered about the mechanics of attention. The relevant insight is not just that beginners see more; it's that experts see more of certain things and less of others, and the "less" category expands silently over the course of a life, without announcement, without any moment when you decided to stop seeing. ↩︎

¹⁷ There's something about the drive home on 395 that belongs here. Going back north, in the other direction, through the same towns I'd passed on the way down, I kept noticing things I hadn't registered the first time. The hand-painted arrows on the motel signs. A diner I was pretty sure I'd passed but couldn't remember having looked at. The way the light changes in the Owens Valley in a way that doesn't happen anywhere I've lived since. Whether the funeral opened something up or whether ten hours of driving just used up all my preoccupation and left me with what was actually there? I'm not sure. Probably both. ↩︎