He could be whimsically gracious to visiting strangers, but also shockingly rude; a friend from the Iowa Writers' Workshop recalled how Cheever got drunk before a scheduled meeting with some local Christian Scientists — "This was a big event for these people, and he just treated them like dirt".
There's no doubt that Clooney has a taste for directing comic dramas that have an audience of just one or two, but when he showed these things the moment felt dutiful, and it seemed possible that the basket existed primarily for the benefit of visiting strangers.
"Can anything be done about that?" She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, and a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer.
They drive up the repaved mountain road to drop off fitful elegies, naïve art about heaven and patriotism, stuffed toy animals, biblical excerpts and scrawled variations on what has become the resistance mantra of the Flight 93 passengers: "Let's roll!" "The human race is a funny apparatus," says Mr. Miller, making no pretensions at managing the grief of visiting strangers.
"In earlier times, it was a custom in many unheated homes in Iceland to share beds to stay warm, even with visiting strangers as a gesture of hospitality.
Furthermore, Plutarch reports that at the next Olympic Games: "[when] Themistocles entered the stadium, the audience neglected the contestants all day long to gaze on him, and pointed him out with admiring applause to visiting strangers, so that he too was delighted, and confessed to his friends that he was now reaping in full measure the harvest of his toils in behalf of Hellas".
As we walked, we passed homes of strangers where my father and his father used to spend subzero winter games from past decades warming up during halftime with food and a fire -- homes that still were opening their doors to any visiting strangers donning the familial team colors.
If you sign up for a local freebie program, always be careful when visiting strangers' homes, and check the infant formula package for expiration dates and signs of opening or contamination.
Perhaps you'll find your very own "visiting stranger," if you play your cards right.
"They longed for them," Kopenawa recalled, and occasionally visited these strangers to get a machete or ax.
