Six strangers going my way
Enraging, humbling, heartening encounters from the road.
Conroy | Philadelphia
“You do know you’re cutting line, right?” a man I’ll call Conroy yelled. “Do you two think you’re special? You’re not. All of these people have been waiting longer than you.”
Conroy, his small eyes flashing anger beneath his Flyers toque, poked my 17-year-old, Kris, hard on their shoulder. We had just passed through the third base gate at Citizens Bank Park on a chilly April day in Philadelphia and, unknowingly, stepped inside a throng of Phillies fans lined up to enter a collectibles shop.
(I should mention that we were wearing Dodgers jerseys, which is now arguably the Major League Baseball equivalent of pulling for Duke.)
Kris and I are both about 5 feet tall, and neither of us navigates packed public areas with aplomb—something actress Quinta Brunson knows well. When I’m eye-level with dozens of sternums and beer cups, my sense of space tends to disappear. I need a minute to find daylight between the tall trees, to locate the directional signage. For Kris, who is autistic, sensory sensitivity also is a challenge.
Add to that mix one angry stranger lacking physical boundaries, though, and I’m suddenly not as small and uncertain as I seem. I pulled myself up to my full 61 inches of height, summoned my inner grizzly bear, and turned to lash back at Conroy.
“Hey! We’re just trying to move through the concourse,” I growled. I jerked my arm up and gestured in front of me. “I cannot see around all of you. I didn’t even know we were in a line.”
He grumbled and walked away, leaving me to perhaps call him a name under my breath. Now it was my turn to put a hand on Kris’ shoulder, to urge them to move forward and away from the hostilities.
But that shoulder was done. Kris was stretched to their sensory limits. And though I knew better, I had helped put them there.
“I can’t,” Kris told me tersely, their body like stone save for the repetitive tapping of one foot. “You have to go first. You have to go. I can’t move until you move.”
Estelle | Port Perry, ON
This road trip had been going so well until Conroy showed up.
A week earlier, we had been in Canada for my father-in-law’s 85th birthday. A late-March ice storm had crackled against the windows and bent the trees and speared the power lines in Ontario, leaving us in darkness for the night. Three days later, Trump would darken the Rose Garden with his most head-scratching tariff announcement yet. His measures had already caused layoffs, hastened collective bargaining agreements, and shifted political fortunes inside Canada.
But opposition to Trump had brought Canadians closer together. They were fighting back. On March 30, it was still unclear to me if we would do the same.
“It must be really odd,” my sister-in-law had observed, “living inside a country you no longer recognize.”
“It feels like grief,” I said. The CTV news ticker skated across the bottom of her television screen: Trump, tariffs, hockey, Trump, tariffs, hockey.
She nodded from her recliner. I was lying on her couch, looking at the ceiling, arms crossed over my abdomen. The scene felt both psychiatrically and politically apropos—if your therapist was also dutifully boycotting your country’s products.
“I guess it would be like grief,” she agreed. “I guess it’s like being a stranger in your own home.”
That seemed right. But I was no longer sure what it meant to be a stranger in my own country because I was no longer sure what being American in the year 2025 meant to the people around me. How did any of us perceive our values, our symbols, the stands we might take for one another in the name of being American right now?
How did I feel about the people we are and the country we represent?
That morning, I had struck up a conversation in a Tim Horton’s with another customer, a woman in her 70s named Estelle. While we both waited for our orders at the counter, I learned a great deal about Estelle and her family; but the most important thing I learned is that she would be the first person out of her chair to grab the ibuprofen for your headache or the mop for your spilled drink.
I know this because when my order was called, and I winced a tiny bit at the heat of the paper cup, Estelle began to scurry from one end of the restaurant to the other looking for a protective sleeve.
“Oh, it’s fine,” I told her, shifting the cup from left hand to right, right hand to left. “Please, don’t worry about it.”
“No,” she said, “there must be one here somewhere. We don’t want you getting burned. Let me just look behind here.”
She planted her palms on the counter and peeked way over its border. As a fellow short person, I watched her and grew concerned.
“It’s OK, really—I can just make my own with a couple of napkins.”1
“Oh dear, are you sure?”
I was. I wanted to hug her and tell her all was fine. I felt we’d been through a minor battle together and had come out stronger on the other side.
And then she asked me if I was local.
I hesitated. I break out in a sweat attempting to order coffee according to Canadian custom, so I imagine she knew I was not a native. But I wanted to be worthy of her determined search for that coffee sleeve, of her nervous efforts to protect me. I’ve known so many women like Estelle who’ve worked endlessly and without complaint to polish and shine and keep the world safe, only to have someone track mud through their kitchens.
If I told her where I was from, would she know which version of that place I stood for, and that I wanted to keep the world safe, too? Would she know that I was sorry about the mud, sorry about burning their economy, sorry about being a terrible neighbor?
Would she know that all that noise coming from the south wasn’t just the bluster of a stormy president; it was also pieces of our collective soul breaking off and crackling against their windows?
She was Estelle. Of course she would know.
Still … I hedged.
“No,” I said, motioning to the family waiting for me, “we’re just in town visiting. It’s my father-in-law’s 85th birthday this evening.”
“Oh, how nice,” Estelle said, putting an earnest hand on my forearm. “I know you’ll have a good time. And I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Really.”
Dante | Boston
If you read the research on talking to strangers, you learn there are no contraindications to the practice. Even small interactions with people you don’t know can do as much or more for your well-being (and theirs) than spending time with close friends and family. The happiest countries in the world, a recent study reported, are not the wealthiest nations; they’re the ones where community and collaboration matter more than competition and prosperity. Now that we no longer hunt and gather and collaborate to build civilizations from nothing, we are comfortable looking past one another. Especially in our cities.
Which is why, when we detoured to Boston on our trip home, a man I’ll call Dante caught my attention as I headed to the Museum of Fine Arts on the T.
He climbed onto the train at the stop after mine on State Street, after I’d split with the rest of my family, who had decided to chase their science interests across the Charles River. Tall and thin and maybe in his 30s, Dante carried a calm, observational energy. No phone in his hand, head up, eyes engaged. Different from everyone else.
His jeans were a little too long, the strings of their worn hems sweeping like a broom beneath him, and his green flannel shirt was a little worse for the wear. A loaf of bread in its twisty-tie packaging peeked from his backpack’s broken blue seams, and he held something in one hand that I couldn’t make out from my seat.
The train traveled a minute or two before he spotted something that troubled him.
“Excuse me,” he said to a woman sitting across the train from me, “you just dropped your receipt.”
The woman was wearing headphones and didn’t acknowledge him. He tried again.
“Excuse me,” he said to the man sitting next to her, “there’s a receipt next to your shoe. I think it belongs to her.”
The man shrugged as if to say, “Not my problem.”
But Dante was politely insistent.
“Can you possibly ask her? She might need it. She might miss it.”
My first visit to Boston was with a journalism mentor in 1994. She was showing me how to be a features writer, how to meld storytelling with reporting. The genre suited me as an introvert because so much of the work was quiet; its lifeblood was the observation of human experience, the Proustian idea of discovering new worlds through the eyes of others. And Val Lauder was an extraordinary instructor who demanded you pay attention to those worlds. She chatted with waiters, spoke with staff, noted details I would have missed. She picked up every pamphlet and business card at every establishment we visited and recorded every hint of poignancy around her: colors, weather, emotions, gestures, “just in case.”
Over time, that practice also became a salve for my social anxiety. I trained my mind to become comfortable around strangers the same way Val taught me to write features: by engraving the details of expressions, clothing, mannerisms, and other vivid minutiae into my mind, in such a way that those details came to belong there. In such a way that I belonged to them.
We can also foster community in a disconnected world in this way. We can make the details of others matter to us. And the more the lives of others matter to us, the more we care about their outcomes, too.
Because there we were on the T, Dante and me, two strangers obsessing over a dropped receipt that didn’t belong to either of us.
I didn’t know exactly why the receipt bothered Dante, but I knew that it had begun to bother me solely because it bothered him. I was rooting for him to build a makeshift civilization right there on the Green Line. I was rooting for all of us.
C’mon, I tried to telepath to the woman, just pick up the receipt.
Exasperated, she finally bent forward and used her fingernails like a pair of tweezers to lift the paper a few inches off the ground. She squinted, then let the slip flutter down and away.
“It isn’t mine.”
Dante, who had sensed my interest, looked at me wordlessly and shrugged.
“It was good of you to check,” I said, shrugging back.
He shook his head.
“You wouldn’t believe what people leave laying around on the street in this city.”
He lifted the object in his other hand slowly, delicately, like he was lifting a stray puppy by the scruff. It was a single pink carnation with a spray of baby’s breath, wrapped in cellophane and tied at the bottom with a white ribbon. The card nestled inside read, Thank You.
“I found this on the sidewalk before I got on the train. How do you drop something like that without even noticing?”
Eric & Shane | Boston
The next day broke bright and beautiful across Boston. We took a walk to a landmark I’d seen while zooming around on Google maps, an otherwise unmarked spot in the Public Garden overlooking a pond. The Robin Williams bench from Good Will Hunting.
You’ve likely watched the scene that took place there. It is, at its heart, about the courage to know yourself and to be known by others. About choosing not to be a stranger. It’s worth viewing again.
My daughter Janie believes all the ideas and all the movies and all the young actors from the 1990s—the Damons and the Afflecks especially—are “cringe,” and I am in no position to argue with her on that last point because there are plenty of Dunkin’ Donuts ads available to corroborate her opinion. And I am also in no position to lecture her on an era that she does not recognize—one that I remember fondly, possibly naively, for its analog sincerity.
Because we swept away the qualities that gave that decade its charm before she could experience them. The last tiny thrills of anticipation, mystery, and discovery, all those offline delights she can’t name but intuitively knows are missing from her daily life.
We handed her generation instead a toolkit for loneliness—angry division, siloed communication, and the ability to avoid both the joy and the inconvenience of other humans through taps and clicks and scrolls and now, AI.
We dropped the flowers. We ignored the receipt. We took it for granted, the mystery and discovery. We became strangers by choice, not chance.
Janie avoids getting to know new people not because they scare her, but because she worries they do not have the muscle to care about who she really is—which is still a version of fear. She knows—and I know—that she is so much more than what a social media account conveys. She is color, weather, emotions, gestures, Val Lauder’s notebook full of “just in case” vignettes. She is thousands of poignant, real-life details that a screen can never capture. We all are.
But I think—I hope—we still can be the better, fuller, analog versions of who we once were to one another.
I hope she’ll meet more people like Eric and Shane, two young men about her age who sheepishly approached Robin’s bench while we took photos.
“Do you mind—sorry to bother you guys—but do you mind if we just touch the bench?” they asked. “Real quick. You know, for good luck?”
They were visitors, too, wearing Red Sox jerseys for the game at Fenway that afternoon. They would not have been born yet when that scene was filmed in the early 90s, and they, like us, followed a map to locate the bench for which there are no posted signs or directions or fanfare of any kind. I knew nothing else about these two young men. But something about that choice to find a nondescript bench from an old movie, and their earnestness in this cynical moment in history, moved me.
So did this: The following day, while I argued with a man in a ballpark in Philadelphia, 100,000 people filled the area around Robin Williams’ bench and across Boston, joining almost 1 million others at 1,400 sites across the country to protest the Trump administration’s cruel disregard for the daily challenges and rights of Americans.
I was astounded by the photos of Boston’s Hands Off event. We were fighting back after all. Maybe Eric and Shane were among the demonstrators.
I hope they were.
I know I should have been.
(Not) Bryson Stott | Philadelphia
Instead, I was here.
“You have to go first. You have to go. I can’t move until you move.”
“OK, you’re right, I’m sorry,” I told Kris after our encounter with Conroy. “I’m so sorry.”
I barreled through the rest of the crowd to find our seats, with Kris close behind me. I saw limbs and chests not as people but as obstacles and roadblocks. I mowed past everyone, even knocking a few off-balance, more small bulldozer than woman.
I’m not proud of it—the angry reaction to Conroy, the plowing through strangers as though they were objects. It’s the opposite of what I strive for. The opposite of the spirit across the United States on April 5.
Sometimes we are not the people we want to be. Sometimes we are not the parents we need to be. Sometimes we are not the citizens our country demands us to become to save it from despotism. Everything can fall apart when you aren’t looking.
But there are strangers who care enough to help if we let them. Strangers joining together or acting alone to clean up the mud we’ve tracked.
When the game ended, Kris and I waited to exit our row. Mothers, fathers, small children passed by us. Older folks, younger folks, Dodgers fans, Phillies fans. We waited. And then a younger man wearing a Bryson Stott jersey, a man who had stood and taunted opposing fans throughout the game, spotted Kris at the end of our aisle as he started up the stairs. I imagine he spotted overwhelm. He stopped abruptly, halting the foot traffic behind him—to the great annoyance of his fellow fans—and nodded at Kris.
“You go first,” he said, kindly. “I’ll wait.” ♣
Or serviettes, as they are known in Canada, another giveaway that I am American.