July 2, 1971

Loneliness

Sometimes I make it a point to ignore people I am afraid of. I am afraid of dirty old men and people without legs or arms and I’m afraid of bikers ---- well, I’m not really afraid of anyone, not really, but there are certain people whom I’d just as soon ignore if at all possible. If they look at me, I look the other way and if they call out for me, I just keep on walking. There is no fear in the world that can keep up with my fleeing mind and body.
Two weeks ago I couldn’t walk away from the undesirable people, the people whom I say scare me when I don’t want to use the stronger words like disgust or repulse and I’m trying hard not to be condescending. I was selling beads downtown, sitting at a table which made me by definition immobile, not free to move away when the spooky people came by. An old man was the first. He did not walk over to my bead stand. He
wheeled himself over in a wheelchair. He had no legs. He said nothing but hello, how are you, I will buy me a ring when I get the money. Five times that day he promised he would get some money, very soon, perhaps in a half hour or so. I knew he would not get the money or buy a ring, but I said nothing except hello, that’s really nice, I will be sitting in the same place until I go home. Five times I did not vary my answers, lest he might think that I knew he was not going to buy a ring and I did not wait for him to come by and choose one. Nobody waits for old men with no legs, and I couldn’t let him think that I, too, have no time for a destitute paraplegic, with no legs, no money, no friends, no home except for the street in front of a large department store, where people flock to shop but have no time to share of themselves.
There was another old man who stopped by to talk to me. For over a half hour he related how his wife, his sister, his dog and his canary all died within 6 months of another. That was a year ago. He will be 90 in October, I think. Before he left ---- he said he didn’t want to go, he had nowhere to go anyhow, but he was afraid of boring me (“Young girls have better things to do than to listen to sad old men all day”) ---- he said please don’t get mad at me, promise you won’t get mad, but I think you are pretty. Young lady, I
think you are very pretty. And he left.
Am I the only thing remaining to a 90-year-old man, me and a thirty minute one-way
conversation? He smiled and then went shuffling down to another street somewhere, or perhaps he never left that one street, I really don’t know as it’s very difficult to see past 40 feet in a crowd of hundreds of people. Am I the only one who receives the smiles of lonely old men and forgotten paraplegics, and who talks with grandmothers who learned how to work beads many years ago when they were still girlscouts? I hope not, I hope there are other people who talk to the crying street wanderers, the street people
who are by a cruel laughing whimsy of fate are no longer young and healthy and beautiful and in possession of the many friends who flock to their own kind of happy or even unhappy people. I sat on the street for hours but I saw no one else who so much as smiled at my lonely friends. Everybody else turned the other way when called to by old lonely eyes, everyone else kept on walking, they just kept on walking because it’s
the easiest thing to do when you’re scared or repulsed or maybe just condescending towards the people on the streets. I have stopped running, I now stop when cried out to, because for one day I could not flee from the lonely people, the haunted and haunting people with no legs and no friends and a lost youth somewhere, the people
who had no one to turn to except a 21-year-old, pretty and healthy bead vendor with nothing in common to them but who was willing to smile and listen and maybe say a nice word or two. Did they know that I previously belonged to the hundreds of walkers-on-by, that the only reason I did not run that day was because I was trapped by
circumstance, I did not walk on because I had to tend to my bead stand? Did you know how afraid I was of the dirty old men and the distorted bodies with no arms or legs, and of God-only-knows-who-else, that I, too, wanted to flee your empty bodies and empty lives? I was so afraid of you, I was afraid you would touch me, with your amputated bodies and lives. I did not want to be touched, so I just kept on walking. I kept on
walking until one day I was forced to stay and listen, your touch was forced upon me and it made me cry. I hope you mistook my fear for love ---- that’s really what it was, wasn’t it? ---- I hope you felt my compassion and my love when you reached out to a stranger on the street because you new she couldn’t run away. I can no longer go by you, the lonely old people trapped on the streets, without at least smiling, because once
upon a time, only two weeks ago, I, too, was trapped on your same street. In our proximity, you touched me and I cried.