Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look
upon you
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking (it comes
to me as of a dream,)…
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone
or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt that I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”
– To a Stranger, Walt Whitman
This morning, my roommate and I ventured out to a coffee shop for the first time in over two months. After weeks of worrying that they were going to close permanently, my favorite of our local coffee shops, the Hungarian Pastry Shop off 111th St., reopened today for takeout only. It’s a staple of a bygone era in New York: cash only, with no Wi-Fi or background music, always spilling over with customers, many of them Columbia professors. Naturally, the experience was different now: we waited outside in a socially distant line, and when we finally got in it was just us at the counter with one other customer, a far cry from the usual confusion of who’s paying next and who’s ordered what. It felt deeply alien, but it was also one of the nicest experiences I’d had in weeks.
Why? Not the coffee and the pastry, though to be sure those were a welcome change. Mostly I suspect it was getting to see people interacting with each other again, particularly in a way that didn’t suggest the other people in the room were a threat. My experience with customer service the last two months has been fraught: quick exchanges from behind plastic in the pharmacy, customers squabbling with each other for space in the grocery store. But this was different: the customer in with us at first was an old regular who one of the baristas knew by name, and she said her daughter had contacted her from Italy to tell her as soon as the news broke that they were reopening, and she’d come right away. The second was a nurse who works at the nursing home around the corner from my apartment, who came in with her scrubs on. The barista asked her to have her boss contact the shop to arrange a day for them to drop off coffee and pastries, and gently rebuffed her attempt to pay.
It was the sum of those events, I think, that made it so noteworthy: such ordinary acts of kindness have been absent for us these past few weeks, holed up as we are without much human contact, and forced by the virus to view each other as potential vectors of disease first and human beings second. More than anything else as this pandemic wears on, I have missed the small ways that we can choose to be kind in our day-to-day lives. Holding a door open for a stranger, picking up a dropped item, carrying a heavy stroller up the stairs, even smiling at a passing face in the street for one reason or another, all these things are impossible now. I felt a tremendous amount of relief just to be in the proximity of this sort of kindness again, though I could be neither the giver nor the recipient.
I’ve never been a people person, but I love humanity in the abstract: the things they do when no one is watching, the chances people take to be kind when no one will thank them for it, the way they appreciate the world all around them. On days when it’s cold and rainy I walk in Central Park and watch New Yorkers stand and take in not the tall skyscrapers in the distance, nor the famous statues, but the blossoming of the cherry trees and the ducks in the ponds. It is a terrible curse to have to live as if every other person poses a danger to your wellbeing, and it seems to me that in the absence of our normal contact with members of our own species we are instead seeking out other kinds of living beings in the hope that they can offer some comfort. More than ever, the parks feel like the beating hearts of the city, the only outdoor place where one can still feel at peace.
* * *
I have been seeking comfort in written worlds, too, both fictional and real. The long descriptions and outsize characters of Charles Dickens, which have annoyed me in previous years, have been a welcome balm in the absence of real people that I can meet on the street. The words of Abraham Lincoln have offered me a view of a country with a leader who cares desperately about the fate of his people, a welcome shift from our own times. The anger and fierce love directed in equal measure towards America by all those who it has wronged help ground me, framing this moment in the context of the trials and the triumphs of American history.
“I love America more than any other country in the world,” James Baldwin writes in his Notes of a Native Son, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist upon the right to criticize her perpetually.” I have joked with many a friend about how much nicer it’d be to be weathering this situation in some other country with better leadership, but the truth is, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. This has little to do with logic or pride in our response so far: it’s undeniable that at least on a federal level, the COVID-19 response has been a disaster. But this is home. I am bound not just by the family and friends I have here, but everyone who is suffering from our government’s missteps and yet struggling to meet the extraordinary demands of this time. “There is no moment,” reflected the journalist Martha Gelhorn as she watched soldiers making small talk on the beaches of Normandy, “when an American does not have time to look for someone who knows his hometown.” Home is a specific place for us, a known corner of this vast country. My hometown has rarely felt farther away than it does in this moment, when getting on a plane is unthinkable and a car is unattainable, but thus stranded, I trust to my fellow Americans in this faraway city all the same.
Admittedly, it’s hard to trust other people at a time like this. States are reopening early, politicians are risking their constituents’ lives for the economy, and it’s true that each of us is a great risk to every other person we meet. Various politicos worry endlessly that we cannot return to normal even if we reopen the economy, because we can’t yet bring ourselves to trust each other. And yet polls show that overwhelmingly, Americans want to stay home, and will accept the risks that come with that it if will continue to save lives. We are seeing, too, that they are choosing largely to be kind in the moments when they could instead be selfish.
Every night during the 7pm clap for essential workers, I take stock of the attendees on our block. There’s the regulars: the guy with an air horn, who I think of as the captain of the 105th St. and Columbus Ave. cheering crew, an elderly man across the street who bangs a very tiny bronze pot and waves at people he knows down on the street, a man who sits on the steps of the building next to me and bangs his cane against the apartment stairs, a woman in the building on the other side who sometimes comes on her own and sometimes brings her partner, the distant figures of a building on Central Park West who sometimes use a pair of cymbals. Then there are the ones who appear from time to time, like two girls on the roof of my building, a man who has only ever clapped once but regularly takes a cigarette break right at 7 just to watch, and the myriad of essential workers who pass through night by night: ambulance drivers, doctors and nurses, delivery people, UPS and USPS workers, police men and firemen, the M7 bus drivers and the people on the bus, helping make sure that the city and the country keep running.
I watch them all every night, and take heart from the tiny piece of human contact it offers me. These are the people I trust, the ones who are staying home like me, and the ones who are out and about doing everything they can to help. To know that the man with the tiny bronze pot is in need of haircut (rather badly), or to notice the night when his neighbor finally put his cigarette down to join in the clapping—these are little tidbits of information and moments that have anchored my life since my world shrank down to the size of my apartment. I am not a healthcare worker or an essential worker. I cannot offer them any help from afar or near. But I can love them for being there, and I do, desperately. I will know that we have begun to return to our normal lives when that clapping is gone, but I think I will look for the clock to read 7pm long after that.
* * *
It feels strange to look for joy in these moments of crisis: I often feel a twinge of guilt when I find it, because I, with a job and my health and the ability to stay home, have been incredibly fortunate in a horrible situation where millions have not. But just as it is terrible to live without our countrymen, it is terrible too to live without joy, and it comes to me mostly in the moments when I am nearest to other people: those exchanges at the coffee shop, a father taking his young daughter out to admire the trees in Central Park, two neighbors shouting greetings at each other from their respective stoops. It is hard to walk by other people and feel gratitude instead of fear at this moment, but I am glad that we are all here together, and that I do not have to face this crisis utterly alone.
I am tired of being afraid. It is much better, I think, to pass by a stranger and feel a glimmer of hope.
—
Title taken from Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” a worthy ode to hope in dark times.
Bare the Iron Hand 