In the passenger's seat of my car, I rode to school.
I think it was somewhere in the thick of October, because the air was cold and stagnant, and all that was left of summer were the wiry bones of trees in people's yards with their crunchy, brittle flesh in a pile at the bases.
The radio was giving off dull music as my mom told me about something that had happened to her the day previously. She was driving, and she let an old man cross the street in front of her car. And in return, he tipped his hat to her.
She told me about how pleasantly unusual it was, and that I should somehow write about it. Because such polite, genuine customs as those are almost extinct in these raw, flashy, vulgar times. And they desperately need to be immortalized.
And as I thought harder about it, I pictured an old black and white movie from twenties with a staticky picture and a moaning old jazz tune setting the scene for a handsome man in a fedora to tip his hat to a pretty, young girl in a black dress with a string of pearls around her neck.
That was from a time where shocking didn't automatically translate to something positive, and things weren't so heavily gilded that they were practically festering with rot underneath all the toxic silver and gold paint.
I thought about that stereotypical black and white movie scene as we approached my high school. A group of kids no older than I were standing mere feet from where the school zone probably ended, silky strings of smoke slipping from the cigarettes dangling from in between their ignorant fingers.
We pulled into the driveway of my dying high school, which you can practically see wheazing with all of the dumb smoke and swears and broken radiator fumes polluting its passages.
As I stumbled along past overly-extrovert kids and recklessly strewn backpacks, I promised that I wouldn't let the tipping of hats die with the last pure generation. Because someday, the world is going to be so deprived of things that are real, that the simple sincerity of a old-fashioned thank you will feel like a remedy to those who have been completely submerged in this terribly varnished, artificial age.