The people I have “met”

Sun burnt knees

I was standing, waiting for the 1 train to come, when a gleaming, muscular black man standing next to me eating a tuna fish sandwich with no crusts spoke up. “Are your knees sun burnt?” he asked me.

I looked down at my reddish knees. It was one of those days that had reached 98 degrees with high humidity, and every extremity of my body was sending capillaries as close to the skin as possible. This always happens to me in hot weather, but I guess it doesn’t happen to black people…?

“No,” I told him, “I’m just really hot.”

“Mmmm.” He nodded. “That looks just like when my girlfriend gets sunburnt. She burns real easy.” And he was off, talking all about how his Irish-pale girlfriend get burnt all the time, how sunscreen makes her condition worse, how she tries to “keep up” with him but clearly has no chance, and he tells her all the time, but she just won’t listen, and just the other day she was outside for only and hour, and when she came back her skin got all red and then it peeled and swelled and nothing would help. He told me he had been running in Central Park, and I told him he should have waited until it was cooler in the day.

“It’s noontime,” I told him. “You should wait until seven or eight, when the sun isn’t so hot.”

“I didn’t go far,” he told me. “I usually run a mile, but after half a mile, I was like ‘whew!’ that’s enough.” He grinned. “A fifty-year-old guy like me can’t be taking it too hard on hisself, you know what I mean?”

It was then that I stepped back and took a good look at his defined pectoral muscles and tried to see the gray wooly touch of sideburns peeking out from under his backwards cap. Fifty? Our train arrived. Neither of us said good-bye.

I guess you don’t do that to strangers in the subway station.

A pen

Again, I was in the subway station, but this time I was waiting in line at the attendant’s desk to ask for a map. In front of me was this family—a father, a mother, and a daughter, probably thirteen years old or so—who were very obviously tourists, because they didn’t know what they wanted, nor could they decide what they wanted once they were given options. Both the mother and the father kept trying to talk to the attendant at the same time, asking him questions, and he was getting pretty fed up with them, seeing as his line was growing longer and longer, the more they bantered.

“Which question would you like me to answer first?” the attendant asked, pushing up his spectacles tiredly and staring at the couple while the girl fidget by the metro-card disposal bin (which was broken—a woman had just tried to deposit her ticket into it, and it fell straight through the bottom and onto the ground).

“We want to get to Chelsea,” the father said. “Where do we buy the tickets?”

When they had finally bought three one-way tickets, I stepped up and received my map and followed them down to the platform. There, my mind was wandering and I thought of something I needed to write down. I was scouring my bag for pen and paper, and I discovered that I only had paper—no pen. As I was searching, I could not help but overhear the couple’s conversation beside me. “Why do they have to be such assholes?” the man was saying to his wife.

“‘What question would you like me to answer first,’” he mimicked. “It’s a tiresome job,” the wife was saying. “Yeah, but it’s his job.” The man was without sympathy. “He should do it with some respect.”

I waited a moment for them to pause before I approached. “Excuse me, would you happen to have a pen I could borrow?” The man and his wife immediately said no; the wife did not even open up her purse. I told them thanks anyway and was about to turn around when the daughter stopped me.

“Wait,” she said, “I think I might.” She pulled one out of her purse and handed it to me.

“Oh, that’s the one she found on the plane!” her mother exclaimed. “She wouldn’t even have it except she took it off the plane.” I smiled politely, wrote down Simon & Schuster’s street location (which I had passed while walking to the subway station and didn’t want to forget) and handed the pen back.

“Thank you,” I told the girl. I didn’t even look at the parents.

A child’s smile

This one didn’t occur in the subway; it occurred while I was running. I was on my way to Riverside Park. Crossing Riverside Drive, I saw a father taking his two young children for a walk: a kindergarten-aged girl with close brown curls and a tiny boy who had clearly just learned to walk steadily on his own, as he was very mobile and loving every second of it. The father and daughter were heading down the sidewalk, but the son seemed interested in me, crossing the street. As I reached the sidewalk, he approached me slightly, and I smiled and pointed toward his father and sister, hopefully indicating that he was wanted.

Suddenly, with a great big grin, he bolted past me, heading right toward the street. I spun on my heel, my first instinct being to run after him and stop him. He was so little—no car would ever see him in time to stop! But immediately the thought “you’re a stranger” occurred to me. I couldn’t go running after someone else’s child. I might scare him into running even faster away from me and into the street.

Luckily, his father quickly ran after him and stopped him before he reached the curb. As I jogged away, I kept looking back to see the father kneeling in front of the son, sternly explaining to him that he was not to do that. I was relieved that the father was not yelling, that “proper” and effective parenting practices were being observed. But I was even more relieved that my lack of action had not resulted in a child’s death. I had looked into that child’s eyes, and I felt responsible. He smiled at me.