Noticing

Months ago I was on my way to the Met to see the show about Sienese painting when I stopped to hold the door open for someone. I’m not a saint or anything but I believe in doing the job that needs doing when you can, when you see it, when you’re not really in a rush, when you don’t have groceries or a train to catch. You see a parent struggling to back into a coffee shop with a stroller, you help them out. That kind of thing.

Once I held the door for a baseball cap dad in the Starbucks in Greenwich, Connecticut. It’s not important why I was in Greenwich. Anyway, I like feeling chivalrous sometimes. He thanked me very nicely. Later I found out his stroller cost as much as a car.

That day by the Met it was snowing, the kind of wet, dirty snow that turns to slush the second it touches the ground. The snow you get when it’s not quite cold enough for snow. I saw an old man pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. He looked a little too old to be the one who pushes. He looked like he could use a push himself. But the woman, I saw, was very sick. She was entirely blank and still. There was nothing in her face. I looked away quickly, the way I always do when I see a very sick person. I’m never sure if I’m being polite or not. Is it worse to stare or to look away? Nobody’s ever given me a good answer on that.

I saw they were going into a building and it’s very hard to enter a building when you’re pushing a wheelchair, it’s very hard to open the door and prop it and push, and so I stopped and held it for him, and he thanked me, and his wife’s face was like a statue, and I said no problem.

As I walked away I saw that the building they were entering wasn’t a home or a clinic or anything like that. It was a nail salon. He was taking her to get her nails done.

I thought about it all day and now I think about it still.