It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that “neighborhood” is defined primarily by the proximity of other people, not by physical boundary, used as it is interchangeably with “district” or “quarter.” Conversely, it’s hard to forget the nomad lifestyle of many in the city, playing as we all are a gigantic game of musical chairs with the slowly dwindling supply of affordable housing units left.
It’s easy, however, to get lost in the masses – to think of oneself as a supernumerary in great society; another position that needs filling, another mouth to feed – and forget that we are all ad-libbing on a stage in which we are simultaneously actor and audience, a complex mesh of co-dependencies predicated on a set of rules of our own creation. It’s easy to turn inward and eschew the other.
Above all, on the other hand, it’s impossible not to see examples of both sides in just two blocks of this fair city; each interaction a microcosm of the whole. Indeed, on just a minor errand of home to bank to deli to home, scenes unfurled before me to which I became an unwitting actor and participant. One white woman in a beige Honda wished to park in order to enter a storefront bank branch and had unfortunately chosen the loading platform of a construction site when the workers were in the process of removing detritus from the upper floors into a nearby pickup truck. It was a good thing her sunroof was closed for the top of the car was soon blackened with soot.
The four Jamaican laborers filling the pickup thought this a hilarious turn of events and, rolling down the passenger side window of her car, the woman gave them a collective tongue lashing as to their rudeness and unprofessionalism. This only made them laugh harder, hooting at her complete obliviousness as to the provenance of the situation. Indeed, two neighborhood kids who were still in Catholic school uniform sitting outside the next-door pharmacy and a black man just come out the subway station on the corner had tuned into this bit of entertainment and were looking around for others to share their revelry in. I asked the man what was going on, and he only nodded, grinned and cocked his head towards the foreman who had the ignoble task of breaking up the exchange, which only prompted a renewed bid of exasperation from the hapless woman.
Down the next block an tiny old black woman in leopard-print faux-fur overcoat with matching hat was in a heated racial argument on the stretch of benches that collects old fogies like stamps on a passport with two white pensioners who had taken it upon themselves to mansplain, in effect, how her lived experience was not as bad as she said and that she complained too much. This tete-a-tete was raging on when I had entered the deli and asked for cheap eats. A few minutes later and the Yemeni men who ran the joint gave loud welcomes to the very same woman, who was in the process of slowly creaking her way across the street and into the deli.
Once inside, she demanded a gun so she can shoot some people. The elder Yemeni man kindly responded that he could get her one. I remarked that I had heard the conversation she was having and that there are indeed some morons out there on those benches. She replied that “there’s no need to send those men to hell, they’re going soon enough,” and that the people she had intended to strike dead were some unscrupulous malefactors at the bank who had drained her account of some $28,000 in some scheme that preyed on her advanced age. The woman was 93.
The younger Yemeni pointed out that the bank has protections and that they would get her money back. She confirmed such but that until that happened she was stuck with some $300 to live on plus Social Security, and besides that doesn’t give the satisfaction that personal intervention does. The elder Yemeni jokingly suggested that she park her money with him and such wouldn’t happen. She gave him a Look, and he reminded her of his offers for marriage. She replied that she managed to come within spitting distance of 100 because she had only one marriage in her life, and it was to a man who treated her like a queen. She immediately got misty-eyed, and started reminiscing, by which I mean she launched into a tirade about traditional roles in marriage.
The Yemenis took their cue and started looking over the diminutive woman to the line of customers that had piled behind her, and she turned to me because in my rapt awareness to the goings-on I looked like a “decent young man.” She went on about total devotion to one another and how marriage is indeed between two equals, while slowly meandering her way out of the deli, having sated her need to kvetch about her current situation. I exchanged knowing looks with the younger man behind the counter, and like oil and water she blooped her way out opposite the flow of younger Dominicans preparing for nights out and yuppies preparing for nights in.
In two blocks I had witnessed both a social call and an anti-social call: One of neighbors and one not. While it was all humorous, it was also a mark of who and what belongs to where, and how those connections are made: We’re all strangers, but some are stranger than most.