I met Roosevelt in the housewares section of Goodwill, grieving over a small box.

“Why would someone get rid of this?” he asked as I passed by. The box held a pewter-colored cross with “On Your Graduation” engraved at the top. “Now, you know someone meant to give that to a graduate and for them to keep it, but here it is in the Goodwill. I imagine there’s a story behind that.” He set the box back on the shelf with an air of regret.

I don’t often strike up conversations with strangers, but I like people who imagine stories, and Roosevelt was a compelling figure. He stood well over 6 feet, a lean Black man wearing professorial glasses and denim overalls. He said he was a retired school principal.

I picked up a set of four dessert plates with fruit patterns.

“Wouldn’t those look pretty on a table?” Roosevelt said. “I love a nice table setting.” He told me he did most of his family’s cooking and prided himself on his presentation. Last Thanksgiving, one of his sons had begged him to carve the turkey and serve the side dishes early, since he had to be at his in-laws’ house before Roosevelt’s meal was scheduled to be served. “We had 12 more people coming!” Roosevelt said. “I told him I wasn’t going to take spoonfuls out of my dressing and squash casserole then put the dishes on the table with mouseholes in them!”

He pulled a phone from the front pocket of his overalls and thumbed through the photos. “My granddaughter,” he said, pausing at a shot of a cute teen in a basketball jersey. “Here’s what I want you to see.” He held out the phone to show a close-up of a bee stuck on a barbed-wire fence. “He flew head first into that fence and impaled himself with his wings still spread!” Roosevelt marveled. “Now come tell me what you think this is.”

He led me to a red-and-white plastic gadget. A mechanism allowed it to be clamped to a surface and a crank, when turned, caused two spools to rotate and basically scratch each other’s backs. I couldn’t guess its purpose.

“Maybe to make pasta?” Roosevelt wondered. It was possible to imagine strips of dough curling between the spools, but it didn’t seem likely. He urged me to buy the thing—it only cost 99 cents—but I was running out of lunch hour and decided against it. I said good-bye, and he said maybe we’d meet again at Goodwill or the local flea market.

I couldn’t get that plastic gadget out of my head, so a week later I returned to Goodwill to buy it as a memento of my conversation with Roosevelt. But I was too late; the gadget was gone.

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Vicki Winslow can be found on Twitter @vickiwinslow and her blog