Real weather, Minnesota weather, the kind you can have a four-minute conversation about in February and mean it.

We talked about pigeons, at length, with great bitterness on his side.

Once he looked at my work shoes and said, “Those were designed by an engineer who hated human feet,” and I laughed at that on and off for about a week.

I stayed five minutes.

Five minutes, every weekday, for two years, which is somewhere around two thousand five hundred minutes, which is forty-one hours.

Forty-one hours with a man over two years and I did not know where he was from, or whether he had children, or what he had done for a living, or his last name.