Anne and I returned last week from a week in Scotland. We spent 3 days in Glasgow and then 5 in St Andrews (the “magic village,” one of my colleagues calls it). Every time we go, I wonder whether this is the last time, and hope it isn’t.

I took Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt with me, finishing it in Glasgow. Travels with My Aunt is about Henry Pulling, a fifty-something retired bank manager who reconnects with his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta at his mother’s (her sister’s) funeral. Henry discovers, as Aunt Augusta reenters his life, that almost everything he thought he knew about his father, his mother, and ultimately himself is untrue. Henry, in true bank manager fashion, likes to size people up as soon as they walk into the room, but unfortunately his assessments always turn out to be overly narrow at best, and often completely false. I’ll leave it at that, to avoid spoilers.

When we are alert to them, we realize that we all constantly have moments like that. Traveling, when we run into people that we don’t know and have to size each other up, is even more full of them than usual. Ours started on the airplane to Edinburgh. Anne and I like to order “specialty meals” for the transAtlantic flights, because we have found that they look and taste more like real food than the usual “chicken or pasta.” More often than not we order what the airline calls “Muslim” or “Hindu,” because that usually means “curry.” Now here is the interesting point. The flight attendants, all veterans, had a hard time finding us to give us our “Muslim” meals, even though our seat numbers were marked on the tray. I didn’t understand this until I realized that they made the same mistake with our dinner and our pre-landing breakfast; they tried to give them to a black couple two rows in front of us. In other words, someone that (unlike Anne and me) fit her mental image of “Muslim.” (It was a bad assumption anyway, curry having supplanted fish and chips as the most popular pub dish in Great Britain.)

Once in Scotland, on the other hand, we were asked approximately once an hour whether this was our first trip to Scotland. Our answer got to be almost rote: no, we’ve been here many times, I graduated from the University of St Andrews, I’m back for my college reunion, I do a bit of work for the University so this is at least partially a working trip, etc. At which point, their eyes would glaze over (as perhaps yours are right now) and smile politely. This was especially true in St Andrews, eating in restaurants that we’ve visited many times and being treated as first-timers. Now, we didn’t mind this at all, because — the Scots being so friendly — the question was invariably a prelude to an offer of help to clueless, first-time visitors. Which I, a clueless return visitor, am always happy to accept.

Our reception on our return, sadly, was not the same. An immigration official barked — there is no better way to put it — at us for crossing an imaginary line exiting customs. Once again my only explanation is his wrong assumption of who we were: either pushy Americans wanting to cut the line, or non-English speakers who would understand him perfectly if he just yelled loud enough.

The question this raises is how we know other people. When someone cuts you off on the highway, how do you know that they aren’t simply distracted by some personal problem, or rushing to home or hospital because of an emergency? We don’t, of course. The real question is what assumptions we make. How do we interpret the people and events around us? Philosophers call this hermeneutics, after Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods. Do we view life from an attitude of suspicion? That is the default position for law enforcement (such as our customs officer in Chicago.) Or from one of generosity, which seems to be the typical Scottish attitude. Are we more like Henry Pulling, or like Aunt Augusta?

In fact, what most of us probably want, deep down, is for others to treat us generously while we are allowed to hang onto our own suspicions and prejudices. Which of course won’t work.  I owe that customs officer the same benefit of the doubt that he failed to give me. That is a test that we all fail, all the time. I found myself swearing under my breath because the Criterion, the pub across the street from St. Mary’s College usually patronized by locals and university folk, was overrun last week by apparent tourists, especially golfers. (Damn TripAdvisor.) But there are a hundred different reasons why those people might have been there, and what made it my pub anyway?

In the early 1960s The Naked City was a television cop show based in New York City, which always finished with the same line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Everybody’s got his or her own story. (Including the no-name actors that populated the cast, two of whom turned out to be Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.) We should remind ourselves, every day, that everyone we meet has his own story.