Late one recent weekend afternoon, I was puttering with my vaporizer in the back of the house. Regina and Elijah had gone to the grocery store, and I’d stayed behind to “walk the dog,” the timing of which had nothing at all to do with the fact that the Saints-Eagles game would be starting soon. This was private time, rare enough, and I found myself feeling, as a poet once wrote, the inward bliss of solitude.

I heard a voice from the front of the house, accompanied by a rapping.

“Hello?” the voice said. “Hello? Helllllll-ooooooo-ooooooo? Hellll-ooooo-ooooo?”

We’ve learned, over the years, not to answer the door when someone’s knocking. If it’s a friend or a relative, they’ll eventually call us on our cell phones to let them in. Otherwise, we’ll just wait them out. In Austin, the knockers were either usually clean-water advocates or random guys asking us for a fiver. In L.A., it’s a little more varied, about 30 percent acolytes from one church or another, 30 percent kids selling crap candy for one cause or another, 10 percent random guys asking us for a fiver, and the rest a mix of real-estate agents, scam artists, and other urban effluvia. It’s a big city and we’re in a crowded neighborhood where privacy barely exists. People knock on our door a lot.

“Helll-oooooo?” the voice continued.

I wandered toward the front door in time to see some guy walking away. For some reason, I opened the door and talked to him through the metal gate.

“What?” I said. “What do you want?”

He turned around. His hair dripped down to his shoulders in long, greasy curls. He had a goatee. No other details registered.

“Hey, meester,” he said.

Meester? I thought.

MEESTER?

“Do you want some nice fertilizer for your lawn?”

And Cesar Chavez audibly turned over in his grave.

Looking like the put upon middle-aged middle-class man that I’ve reluctantly become, I shook my head, closed the door, and resumed my afternoon’s business. But my gentleman caller stuck in my mind.

I came of age during the golden age of “cultural diversity,” and I believed the hype. In my teens, I sought out communities that weren’t naturally mine, which actually just means I dated a lot of exchange students, but I still had an open mind. In my 20s in Chicago I found myself hanging out with Uruguayan poets, Guatemalan dissident intellectuals, Mexican painters and art collectors, and a varied assortment of Puerto Ricans. I spent many hours at a café run by a semi-insane Colombian cab driver, and campaigned, through journalism, for the rights of Mexican immigrant eloteros, street-corn vendors who were being harassed by the city.

I don’t think these experiences made me special then, or make me special now, but they did broaden my mind, and my world. I got to experience Latino culture in all its glorious diaspora. And I never once got called “meester.”

As you grow older, your experience with other people, other cultures, other perspectives, is, ideally, supposed to broaden. But I just feel mine growing narrower and narrower—unless I’m losing money to the citizens of four continents while playing poker at the Commerce Casino--and I’m frustrated.

When Regina got home, I complained, as is my wont.

“That sounds annoying,” she said. “But the guy was just trying to make a living.”

“No,” I said. “The ladies at the Post Office are just trying to earn a living. The guys who come home at 4 PM wearing their mechanic's shirts and immediately start working on their own cars are just trying to make a living. The dude next door who owns a construction company is just trying to make a living. Even the guys with the annoyingly loud leaf-blowers are trying to make a living. This guy was just trying to dump a wheelbarrow of cow shit on my front lawn.”

To be fair, my stereotypical antagonist was probably also going around to all my Mexican-American neighbors, trying to sell them the same literal load of crap that he’d pitched me. And I’m sure they found him annoying as well. After all, they’re also just trying to raise their families in a neighborhood that, if the economy ever turned, could get pretty hairy, pretty fast.

But I bet he didn’t call any of them meester.

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