The snowshoer was still talking to me, but I could scarcely hear him; his head and upper body had momentarily disappeared. He was just stowing his snowshoes in the backseat of his VW Beetle. He was telling me he had “other pairs of bear paws”; I heard him say something about the “different shapes,” quickly followed by an incomprehensible bit about the boots I would need. “If I have to take you shopping…” the snowshoer began, but I didn’t catch the rest.

When he emerged from the Beetle, and I could hear him again, he was talking about Charles Dickens. Great Expectations was the novel he thought I should read. All of a sudden, it occurred to me, I had my own expectations. How great or small, I didn’t know. Expectations for myself were new to me.

“Can I give you a lift?” the snowshoer asked me.

“Yes, please,” I answered him.

From the Thompson Cage, I could walk home in about eight minutes; I was imagining I could run home faster than the snowshoer could drive me. It had been a few years since one or more of those Brewster girls had warned me: “Don’t accept rides from strangers.”

At thirteen, I was about five feet five; fully grown, I would end up just short of five feet seven. In the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, the top of the snowshoer’s head barely reached my chin. I accepted the little stranger’s offer of a lift home—not only because I wanted to hear more about the aforementioned Great Expectations, which the diminutive snowshoer believed I should read, but because I wanted to see how he managed to drive.

I was already acquainted with the interior of a VW Beetle; it was my mother’s choice for a car, perhaps owing to her smallness, but I had never seen the driver’s seat in such a dramatically forward position. The snowshoer’s knees were almost touching the bottom rim of the steering wheel, and he didn’t actually sit on the seat. He gripped the wheel so tightly that his fanny never touched the seat. As the stick shift for the Beetle was on the floor, between the two front seats, the snowshoer reached behind him to change gears. I immediately thought that my mom would admire the position the snowshoer maintained while driving. It resembled the ninety-degree angle she held for her wall sits. And although my first trip with the snowshoer was a very short drive, the tensile position he tenaciously held was made more impressive by the small English teacher’s recitation of a passage from the opening chapter of Great Expectations. My confusion came from my not understanding he was quoting Charles Dickens. I thought the snowshoer was telling me about his own unhappy childhood, not the graveyard circumstances of a fictional character.