getting there
It sure is beautiful out.There is a book lying open in my lap but it is, in fact, so beautiful out that I have grown distracted and started looking out the streetcar window.
I turn my head from the window towards where he is sitting. Sure is! I say, upbeat but noncommittal, and return to the window.
Talking to strangers is one of the pleasures of public transportation for me, but I’m not right now in the mood. I am reading a good book. And besides that I don’t usually get to take the streetcar, and its route runs through neat little neighborhoods. I have purposely taken a seat next to the window with an empty seat beside it.
I was just at the hospital, he continues. Sigh, I think. This is not just going to be an unwelcome conversation. It is going to be an unwelcome conversation of oversharing.
I reluctantly turn again. He explains how a bike accident several months ago messed up his leg. How he re-injured it this week. Each time I offer a polite response and turn back to the window, he continues. He speaks across the aisle and the empty seat between us. How he has found a specialist, the best specialist, at this hospital, Dr. So-and-so, how they took an MRI this morning and hopefully it can be fixed with therapy. He doesn’t want surgery. This is the point he returns to.
After four stops a young woman gets on and sits in the seat between us. There we go, I think, but he continues, just as before, so that she has to lean back awkwardly to stay out of the way. Eventually he trails off. I go back to the view. The woman gets up and a man with a cane slides into her place.
I was just at the hospital, says Bike Accident to the new audience. The man with the cane looks at him carefully. Me too, he says.
They exchange stories. Rather, Bike Accident delivers his same story again, while the man with the cane tries to engage him in exchange. They were, after all, both just at the hospital. But Bike Accident has a lot to say. It is hard for him to listen.
The man with the cane is a good listener. He adjusts. He is 71. I learn more about him from what he doesn't say. He is calm. He doesn’t seem bothered when his comments go unnoticed. Bike Accident eventually takes a breather.
I’m curious about this book you’re reading, says the man with the cane. I like the title, he says. I realize he is talking to me. I turn and smile. The book in my lap is A Good Man Is Hard To Find.
It’s a book of short stories, I say. I’ve only read two so far.
He looks at the cover, at the name of the author, Flannery O’Conner. I love that Irish brogue they use, he says. And he smiles a smile of communion. He is probably picturing the author as a reclusive hard-drinking Irishman rather than a twenty-something Southern Gothic catholic girl, but I am glad that my book has pleased him.
Bike Accident picks up again. He brings it around from his injury to the habits of his brother, or father, or stepfather – I am getting my things together to get off so I don’t hear the details. Only that this person yells a lot, that Bicycle Accident doesn’t like being around him. There is something about alcohol.
The man with the cane frowns at the relative’s difficult behavior. You have to learn to love yourself, he says, as advice to the absent relative, and then that love comes out on other people. It is such an honest thing to say on a streetcar.
Good luck with your leg I say to Bicycle Accident as I get out, and I look in his eyes, and I mean it. Enjoy the day says the man with the cane to me. Maybe I’ll be seventy one before I’m the person I want to be, and maybe not even then. I’ll keep practicing.
posted by tortaluga @ 3:09 PM
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