What 'You Know What I Mean?' Means
Our chance encounter with the laconic Flo from Fonda continues to resonate
My spouse and I have bought and sold about 10 homes in the 30 years we’ve been together. Homes in Seattle (three of them now worth a total of $3.3 million according to Zillow where my spouse was employee No. 43 when Zillow was just a startup so we know all about about Zestimates) and several more homes in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.
We’ve looked at thousands of more homes online, probably tens of thousands, and we’ve personally toured hundreds of other homes not just for recreation but — us being us — because we’re so at ease buying and selling real estate. That included a foray several years ago to a camp on the shores of the Great Sacandaga Lake in the southern tier of New York’s Adirondack Park.
The camp was a three-season bungalow set on cleared point with a lawn stretching about 100 yards to the sandy shoreline of the lake. We had seen the listing online one week when we were staying at a family camp nearby, and we decided to take a drive up to check the place out. I may have called the listing agent to ask if that was OK, since the place was unoccupied, or maybe we just showed up and started poking around.
That’s when we met Flo.
Flo appeared out of the side door of her more substantial year-round dwelling just to the right of the camp for sale. She was trim and reserved and did not seem too eager to engage with us, except to nod in the most subtle ways as she went about some chore in her garden.
But that didn’t stop us from waving to her in the most eager and friendliest of manner. “Hey there, we’re just here checking out this place,’’ we shouted over, trying to get Flo to act as the de facto real estate agent who could tell us about the camp and the little neighborhood out on the point and how much the water ebbed and flowed during the course of the year.
Flo, ever the reluctant participant, finally had to give into our incessant and enthusiastic hectoring. She meandered over toward us, stepping over reams of goose poop and a string that ran down the length of the lawn — a marker that seemed to demonstrate where her lot started and where the lot to the for-sale camp stopped.
As former journalists, and as eager potential buyers, we continued to pepper Flo with questions, and she finally opened her mouth to reward us with a few informative words to try and satisfy our rampant curiosity.
Turns out Flo was from Fonda, a former factory town near the Mohawk River about 40 miles away. Flo and her husband and their daughter spent a good deal of time at their lakeside home, which was a departure from the scrubby camps and some RVs and trailers parked on bitty little lots out on the lakeside point.
Inherently we knew that getting Flo on our side would be key to a good tour and understanding of the for-sale camp, and we were fast-tracking whatever potential relationship we would have with Flo from Fonda when we bought the camp.
I know. We were getting way ahead of ourselves. But that’s the rush of real estate, which is the rush of new possibilities, new environs, new people to meet, new vistas.
For about 25 minutes, Flo was our tour guide, our savior. We hung on every word she spoke since be default, she was representing the camp that wasn’t hers but was right next to her place. The only problem was, about two sentences into her eventual decision to actually talk to us, it turned out Flo had a fairly decisive habit of punctuating everything she said with the phrase: “You know what I mean?”
For example, when she pointed to the rock jetty stemming from the beach in front of us, she said when the water was high in the spring, the jetty disappeared. “You know what I mean?”
Or when she said that the neighbors in the camps in the back had a 10-foot right-of-way to access the water. “You know what I mean?”
Or when she said “My husband and I would never sell because our daughter loves this place too much. You know what I mean?”
It wasn’t too far into Flo from Fonda’s willingness to start talking to us that Diane and I realized we could not keep a straight face. Every time Flo said something, anything, like even a two-word sentence like “Over there,” she punctuated it with her go-to followup “You know what I mean?”
In the less than half hour we were with Flo, she must have said “You know what I mean?” at least 30 times. And by the time Diane and I got to the car to drive away, we had gone from prospective camp buyers to linguists, attempting to understand how a person could come to employ a repetitive phrase that rendered anything and everything Flo from Fonda had to say into a question. You know what I mean?
But what was at first a jarring introduction to Flo’s reoccurring verbal device came to represent something not to be made fun of but to be embraced. We all want everyone to know what we mean. We all want to know we’ve been heard. So I really came to appreciate what Flo from Fonda meant. She meant she wanted to be understood.
Of course, like dozens of other properties we’ve explored, we never bought the camp. But Flo stays with us forever. You know what I mean?
Go with Flo. You know what I mean?
Go with the flow ? Ya know what I mean ?