Cobs of Wisdom
Living in a world where we can still be surprised
I was sifting through the bins at the pay-by-weight Goodwill when I happened upon a cob of corn. Yes, you heard me right. Between the broken Barbie campers and the punctured tennis racquets and the stuffed animals begging to be loved again, there lay a cob of corn. It was half-nibbled, half-intact. Its kernels hung on precariously like loose teeth.
If you think about it, the cob of corn could have ended up in the pay-by-weight bin for any number of reasons, none of them good. Someone might have been right in the middle of eating it when they decided to bag up a pile of old shirts that didn’t fit anymore. Or it might have happened while shopping. A mother might have found her children arguing over the wet, yellow snack and said enough, flinging it into the fray. Perhaps it was a family heirloom, the sort that tend to make their way here eventually. You see enough tender love notes and bronzed baby shoes, and suddenly a cob of corn seems pretty darn reasonable.
After my run in with the rogue starch, I texted my friend Kate. Kate is a devoted pay-by-weight shopper I have known since kindergarten and one of the few people on Earth who can find the Prada shoes among the wet diapers.
“Amazing!” she wrote back about the cob. “I’m so glad to live in a world where you can still be surprised.”
Kate is the kind of friend who is not only stylish, generous, and smart, but also gung-ho. She will always meet you at the art show and will never fail to produce a stellar dinner reservation. I remember, in particular, the night she met me at the Greenhouse bar. Kate was well into her divorce and I was freshly enmeshed in a breakup, so as the robust monstera plants and thirsty ferns looked on, we drank our margaritas and talked about the future. She had already been through this, the whole packing your bags thing. The whole “what if” thing. The whole someone hating you thing. It was new to me, but on the bright side, my mother had just given me an embroidered blouse she said she never wore anymore, and I had just bought a chunky necklace at Southern Thrift, and I was loving that margarita. Kate laughed at my jokes and ordered us another round. I remember thinking, I’m home! I’m home! Everybody likes me at home!
As the night went on, we talked about books and sisters, therapists and epiphanies. She told me about our kindergarten classmate who had embarked on the impossible, but ultimately rewarding, journey to find his biological father. I told her about my writing. Sitting there with Kate, uncovering histories and comparing the deals we’d gotten on our shoes, I started to feel better about the state of things. After all, she had been through hell and still knew exactly which earrings would look best with her purse. She had started dating again. Buoyed by her company and the second round of margaritas, I knew that someday I would, too.
As it turns out, the future we envisioned wasn’t so outlandish — love, book deals, unexpected treasures in the pay-by-weight bins — but when Kate and I met up to celebrate her engagement, I was still thinking of that evening at the Greenhouse bar. I remembered how we toasted to a someday we couldn’t quite make out yet. How we squinted. Years later, as she showed me her engagement ring and I showed her mine, I thought, what a delight to live in a world where we can still be surprised.
Copyright © 2025 by Mary Liza Hartong. All rights reserved.
Mary Liza Hartong lives and writes in her hometown of Nashville. She’s a Dartmouth grad, a proud aunt, and an avid reader. Her first novel, Love and Hot Chicken, is out now from William Morrow.
