Lost & Found

The biggest gift of today was that I met strangers again.

I met strangers on the train from Baltimore to New York. I met strangers because I made mistakes. First, I got on the wrong train and met a woman who was kind. Then, I got on the right train and met a man who was driven and entrepreneurial. Then I got on the wrong Subway platform and met a woman who walked me the whole way to the right Subway platform, two stops later. (If you end up trying to go to Manhattan from Hoyt St in Brooklyn, you have to go down the correct set of stairs. No one tells you these things.)

I realize now, on the right train home, that the pandemic stole (among many much more important things) the gift of meeting strangers. Or when I did meet them, it was in two dimensions, contained in a Zoom window, with a fake background and softening touch-ups on the video feed. I didn’t know that I missed the accident of sitting on my seatmate’s coattail or the courtesy of saying, “excuse me.”

And maybe one gift that the pandemic gave us was a collective softening, so that when a woman gets on the wrong train, a stranger kindly points them in the right direction. I found something today that I didn’t know I had lost — and I’m so glad to have it back.