It’s a rainy weekday night. I’ve just finished with a client in Seattle and have decided to wait out the traffic for a couple hours before getting on the freeway. There’s construction on the Ship Canal Bridge, bringing traffic down to two lanes, and a landslide further north by my home that’s blocking all northbound lanes of the interstate. I’ve asked some friends to meet me for dinner and have an hour before we meet up.
Outside one of my favorite indie bookstores, Elliot Bay, a man and woman have set up. She’s an older African American woman, missing some teeth, sitting on her walker. He’s a white man, maybe a decade younger than her, in dirty jeans with an unkept beard. Various plastic bags and backpacks surround them. I wonder if they do this gig often together, if they are friends or partners. They make eye contact with me, ask me for money for food. I stop, tell them I don’t have cash. Though I’m not always faithful to this principle, I have a rule for myself to make eye contact with people asking for something. I used to work with homeless youth, and they told me they would rather have someone be unkind to them than ignore them. I’ve never forgotten this–that’s how badly it hurts to feel invisible.
This duo doesn’t skip a beat when I tell them I don’t have cash. “Can you buy us some food, then?” I ask them what they want. They point to the taco joint across the street. “I’ll take some nachos,” the woman says. “Some tacos or burritos or something, and a drink,” the man says.
I have just purchased two books for fifty dollars. I’ve worked all day for a well-paying client, and am looking forward to meeting up with friends where I’ll spend $15 on a margarita. And I have an hour to spare. To tell these two souls that I don’t have time to buy them food or that I “can’t” do it would be lies.
In line at the taco place, I have my recent purchases under my arm–Terry Tempest Williams The Glorians and Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End. A man who looks to be about my age is in front of me in line, and says, “What are you reading?” I show him, tell him I’m looking for reasons to be hopeful. He introduces himself as Omar and we end up sharing a table while we’re waiting for our orders. We talk about our young adult children, how we hope they will read more. He wishes me a good night before he leaves. “Thanks, Omar. Have a great night. Nice to meet you.”
Small interactions with strangers are one of my all-time favorite things, including this one. And I have my spare-changing friends to thank for it. Sure, maybe I did a nice thing by going to buy them dinner. But it’s an exchange. That trip across the street got me into a conversation about books with Omar, and it was worth every minute and dollar.
I’m worried the duo won’t be there anymore and then I’ll be stuck with a lot of hot Mexican food right before dinner. But they haven’t moved. They thank me, open everything up, start eating. I wish them a good night. The rain has let up, and I find a dry place to sit at the park to read Rebecca Solnit’s book and come across this quote from Joanna Macy: “Each and every act is understood to have an effect on the larger web of life.” Rebecca says, “It is a cosmology that recognizes interconnectedness both in how things work and in the moral sense of nonseparation and the obligation to care for the whole.” In front of me, soccer teams are practicing. To my left, skateboarders are congregating. A block behind me, my new friends are eating carne asada. Whatever cosmology this is, I’ll take it.