Urban Encounters

1. My associate and I walked toward Penn Station from our meeting with a hot Internet advertising agency.  The introduction at the agency had been by a friend who had once been managing editor of Esquire.  We were wearing our New York-best, and tromping about like country boys on an important mission.  Suddenly the sidewalks were thin, black men were moving things, a commotion.  Danger, Will Robinson.  We walked toward the curb and threaded the disturbance.  To my left, I saw a woman sitting against the brick façade, sobbing.  We hurried on in silence.  We had a train to catch.  Several blocks later, I asked my associate, “Did you see that woman crying back there?”  I can’t remember what he said, but I have always thought that I am a good person, the kind of person who would help anyone in need if the opportunity presented itself, but a woman was crying in the street and I walked right by her.
2.  I was looking for dinner in Monterey California.  A young man with a pack in a doorway asked for money for food.  He’s a strong fellow, I thought, and probably involved with drugs, so I had better keep walking.  It was a beautiful night and I was lonely.  I thought, maybe I should go back and take the young man to dinner.  It might be interesting.  I didn’t, but the next morning’s news presented a story about Dallas cowboy quarterback Tony Romo taking a homeless man to the movies.
3. I took my family to New York to see a show during a snow storm.  We walked north toward Broadway in a large crowd that stopped at a light.  A man in a wheel chair held out his hat and bellowed, “Please give m five dollars for dinner!”  He repeated again and again, “Please give me five dollars for dinner!”  Finally, I said to my daughter, who loves to donate my money, “Put this in his hat.”  She ran back and put the five dollar bill in his hat.  He stopped bellowing.
4. On a beautiful summer night, a gray-haired woman in a wheel chair in San Jose, California held out her cup for change.  Under different circumstances, she could be my mother, I thought.  Under some circumstances, this could be me.  I gave her the change that came out of my pocket – maybe 65 cents.  We walked down the street, and I heard the woman yelling.  I turned around, and she seemed to me yelling at me.  I wondered, did I give her my keys?  Is this some message?  I walked back, and she said, “I want to give you this.”  She reached into a plastic bag and produced a perfectly clean, folded pair of white socks with a blue stripe and a faded yellow stripe around the top.  “Then let me give you this,” I said, and I gave her two dollars.  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

It’s an MRI, Tivo world

“I’ll be back in 40 minutes,” said the Open MRI machine operator.  “I don’t think so,” I thought.  There was no way I could stay there for 40 minutes without moving.  This feeling started in my first MRI attempt:  I was on my way to a funeral, and the MRI felt like a casket. Lately, though, the whole world is an MRI. 

I can’t sit in meetings in which I can predict the participants’ responses — the person who will play devil’s advocate for the sake of exhausting all possibilities, the one who will patronize some minor contribution with an elaborate thank-you, the lengthy discussion when everyone already agrees on what must be done.  I can’t do it anymore.  I don’t want to sit on long plane flights.  I fall asleep in bad movies.  Conference calls are confining. The world is closing in and time is running out.  I’m in the great clanging MRI Tokamak most of the time, and I hate it.

Maybe this is a good thing.  Perhaps I will be less indulgent of activities that steal my time.  My life could change for the better.

Tivo has also changed my psyche.  Besides flying past commercials, I never miss a sentence.  If I glance away or the words are garbled, I tivo back to see what I missed, which, lately, is nothing at all.  I never miss a detail, and sometimes I move frame-by-frame to study the appeal of a particular character or the detail of a map flashed briefly on the screen.  I find myself wishing that radio or actual conversations could be Tivo-controlled:  instant re-wind on everything, no misunderstandings, perfect experience.

This may not be a good thing, which I first noticed while looking from a plane at something written on a warehouse roof.  I couldn’t make it out.  The man blocking the window wouldn’t move.  The plane’s engine was in the way.  I would go to my grave without that particular knowledge, and, absurdly, I was panicked.  Inside my flying MRI, I had no control.

It’s all a matter of control.  As I look ahead at the older people I know and feel my own physical deterioration, I see more MRI and less Tivo.  I don’t want to go gentle into that evil MRI.