Me Talk Pretty One Day

Lou Sedaris is a skilled and smart man, the kind of person David Sedaris thinks could have invented the microwave “under the right circumstances.” He’s extremely competent at fixing things, but Sedaris and his siblings have learned to steer clear of him when he’s working on something because they know he’ll bore them to tears with long-winded explanations about what he’s doing. One day, Sedaris finds an old IBM advertisement in which his father is sitting next to a large computer. He asks Lou about the picture, but his father launches into an explanation about the technology that IBM was advertising, failing to answer the only thing Sedaris is curious about, which is whether or not the people who took the picture of him allowed him to wear makeup. 

On vacation in a beach town in North Carolina one summer, Sedaris and his sisters focus on their attempts to become the tannest person in the family. Every year, they hold a contest at the end of vacation, but they all know Gretchen will win because she’s naturally darker than all of them. Still, they and their mother try to get as much sun as possible, lying on the beach for hours at a time. While taking a break from tanning one day, Sedaris goes for a walk on the beach and finds his father standing near the water and staring at a group of fishermen. Sedaris can’t help but notice how tan these men are from working in the sun every day, but his father interrupts these thoughts by calling him over and asking him if he could estimate how many grains of sand exist in the entire world.

Sedaris is deeply uninterested in his father’s question about the number of sand grains in the world, and he inwardly laments that his father is about to explain how he might go about answering such a question. Nonetheless, there’s nothing he can do to stop Lou from going on at length and drawing an elaborate equation in the sand. As he does this, the nearby fishermen stop working and listen to him, eventually asking if he’s a tax accountant. One possible reason they ask this, Sedaris thinks, is because they don’t have much money and are no longer able to live by the ocean, having been priced out of their beachfront properties when the town became a tourist destination. 

One of the fishermen asks Lou Sedaris, “If I got paid twelve thousand dollars in 1962 for a half-acre beachfront lot, how much would that be worth per grain of sand by today’s standard?” Without hesitation, Lou says that this is an interesting question and sets to work trying to solve it, drawing a new equation in the sand. As he lectures the fishermen in this manner, Sedaris stands there wondering if the light bouncing off the water will tan the underside of his chin and help him win the pageant with his sisters at the end of their vacation.