Creek Running North

This morning I sat commuting on the subway, innocently minding my own commuting business, listening to loud commuting music on my headphones. Twenty minutes into my ride, a man who had just sat down next to me tapped my arm.

“OK,” I thought: “he must be able to hear my music, and is going to ask me to turn it down. The last thing I want to do is bother anyone, so I’ll just put on my cooperative face and do as he asks.” I pulled out the earbuds and looked at him.

“Good morning!” He smiled. He was 55 or so, slender, dark-chocolate skin and bright white goatee. He wore overhauls and a Caterpillar hat. I smiled back. Good morning!

There must have been an implied question in my response, an expectation that he had something on his mind. He shook his head.

“Oh, I just wanted to say good morning. I think that’s important. You get so upset about things. You get so preoccupied with the minor details of your life. And if you’re not doing that, you’re getting upset about the big stuff, the world falling apart, the things you really are too small to do anything about.”

He turned toward me, put both hands on my arm, squeezed gently to make sure I was paying attention. He was still just as relaxed, still just as friendly, but there was a keen earnestness down deep that froze my spine. He inhaled deliberately, exhaled the same way. His voice got very purposeful, the way my teachers’ voices did when I failed to understand something painfully simple for the third time.

“Look. What good does it do you going around all depressed about the world falling apart? What good does it do the world for you to get other people all depressed about it? You gotta relax, man. You gotta relax.” He settled back into his half of the bench, straightening his spine against the backrest. “Life is still just damned good.”

He breathed again, frowned a second, then chuckled. “I don’t know what just came over me, friend. It felt like something came over me. I don’t know why I did that.”

I stared at him for a second, my eyes the size of pickle jar lids, then broke into my best confused Ted “Theodore” Logan smile, and we had a normal conversation for a while, in which he no longer used the second person singular pronoun. We slid into Embarcadero Station, and I walked up the stairs with trembling knees.