Familiarity breeds acceptance

A writer inspired by the city

I’m grateful that I live in a big city where I am forced to rub up against people who are not like me.

On the subway, I sit next to human beings of all ages and skin colors and shapes. In the streets, I see people in wheelchairs, joyful children, panhandlers down on their luck, women in heels I couldn’t wear for half a block, and helmeted, gray-haired women on bikes weaving their way in and out of traffic. I say hello and introduce myself to the homeless man even though I don’t always drop money into his paper cup. I offer my subway seat to a father with a baby strapped to his front, and he declines with a grin. With my foot, I hold the elevator door for an older woman using a cane and in return, with an eye on my arms full of packages, she pushes the button for my floor.

While I wear a wide-brimmed straw hat in summer and earmuffs in the winter, they sport yarmulkes and fezzes and bike helmets and hijabs and their hair might be dyed all colors of the rainbow or they may have shaved it all or just half of it off. When I am wearing four layers against the cold, I can admire the younger generation’s bare tattooed skin or their muscular legs protruding from baggy shorts or swathed in tight leggings.

Do I know these people personally? No. Do they make me angry? Yes…when I’m groped in the subway or someone cuts in front of me in a line or steals my wallet when I’m not watching my purse. Do they scare me? Sometimes…when a person breaks into an angry harangue against the world in the middle of the sidewalk or rattles me with her disconnected stare in my subway car. Do they make me smile? Often…when they are dressed in wild costumes or carry a parrot on their shoulder or play their bagpipes on a street, ignored by most busy passersby.

Do they make me curious? Yes, when I can’t see what book they’re reading or when they are speaking a foreign language I don’t recognize or when they stop me on the street to ask me to contribute to a cause.

But, like these people or not, I can’t separate myself from them by getting in a car or hiding out in my apartment. Every time, I step on the bus or stride down the sidewalk to do an errand, I am in community with a slice of the world, and for that experience, I continue to be deeply grateful most especially because I’m a working writer.

In the city, I am constantly inspired by the whirl of humanity around me. A detail I note in my daily travels may make it into my novel and months later, not even I will remember the connection. It might be the green eyes of the barista who serves me a dirty chai in my favorite coffee shop or the close cropped beard of my neighbor which fits perfectly my description of the sly bailiff in my 14th Century castle. Just as artists usually have a sketchbook at hand, I carry a journal where I can scribble a quick description of people, places, weather, sounds, emotions. As Gustave Flaubert said, “the good God is in the detail” which has always meant to me, be as specific as you can, especially in fiction where the reader needs to feel welcomed and grounded from page one.

Day after day, I thank the city which enriches my writing because, to paraphrase Mary Oliver, it offers itself so completely to my imagination.