I get off the Metro-North train from Fairfield to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, take the side escalator into the MetLife Building, which, when I was a child, was the Walter Gropius-designed PanAm Building. I walk through the second-floor lobby, stop at Black Seed bagels for a toasted sourdough everything bagel with a light schmear of vegetable cream cheese, continue to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit, and cross the street to The Yale Club where I catch a yellow cab up to 72nd Street and York, which is where my mother is currently in a rehab that was once affiliated with the Carmelite nuns.
For a while, I took the same taxi, which is impossible to do in a city of 9 million people and 13,587 yellow cabs. But every time I stepped out of the Met Life building onto Vanderbilt, there he was: a sixty-something-year-old guy named Mo having a cup of cheap coffee in his boxy Toyota, double-parked in a no-parking zone alongside the Covid-era outdoor dining area of a nondescript Mediterranean restaurant of the sort meant for business lunches. The first time he drove me, we fought (I’m a New Yorker born and raised, and I know the best ways to get from point A to point B, as a rule). The second time he drove me, he said, with an edge to his voice, Hey weren’t you in my cab the other day, and I said yes, I was, and then I apologized to him for being an idiot. The third time he drove me, he wanted to know why I was in the city, so I told him about my mother and her broken femur, and he told me that his mother, now in her nineties, was still at home in Nice, and his brother, the rotten bastard, who lives across the street from her, won’t even go and check on her, or stop to bring her a breakfast bun. He said something in Arabic, and we both sighed and shook our heads. The fourth time he drove me, he said he was waiting for me, and mumbled the Arabic version of So nu? How is she and I said Feh, not so good, and we both sighed again and shook our heads.
This is what happens when people, normal people from totally different backgrounds, living mundane lives, are thrown together to try and machete our way through the jungle of our days.
But there is beauty here, odd that it is. Alice Waters once said that beauty is the language of care, and she was right. Mo was mumbling to me in Arabic that I sort of understand (I grew up with friends from literally every possible background) and I was responding to him in the New York Yinglish that falls out of my mouth when I’m tired or sad or both, and for a split second, it made things okay, even with his rotten bastard brother and my mother and her broken femur.
And this is it, isn’t it? This is what happens when people, normal people from totally different backgrounds, living mundane lives, are thrown together to try and machete our way through the jungle of our days, with aging parents and Medicaid, rotten bastard siblings who don’t help, wishes for peace and good luck even when we all know that the outcome isn’t going to be great, and the pure shit bureaucracy that is designed to torture every single one of us to the point of exhaustion or (at the very least) ennui and existential defeat. If I lived across the street from your mother, I told Mo, I’d bring her some tea and a piece of honey cake, and ask about her day.
I paid Mo and gave him a good tip, stepped out of the cab, crossed the street, and was promptly hit by a young bicycle messenger who ran right into my left calf. It didn’t hurt too much, kind of like a mild rug burn, but it was surprising, and I wondered for a split second if I was bleeding, or in shock (I wasn’t). Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod the messenger said, grabbing my hand. I just stood there looking down at my leg and up at the messenger, and I said It’s okay, I’m okay, don’t worry. And I was. Because honestly, what is the point of getting hysterical these days? Hysteria feels completely ridiculous right now. I told him to be more careful and to drive safely because weaving in and out of traffic in the city on a 1970s racing-style bike with no brakes feels vaguely insane and death-wishy. He was gone in a flash. I stopped at Pret for a large latte to bring to my mother, who, despite not being able to sit upright without help, had inexplicably managed to put on her makeup.
Tell me something good, she said, holding her cheek up for a kiss. They haven’t changed my Depends in hours—
What’s to say? Sometimes, words fail.
When I left, after meeting with the executive director of the facility along with the directors of rehab, nursing, and social work — crazy things were happening since her arrival, like someone wheeling her up to a wall perpendicular to the air conditioning unit in her room, locking her chair, and leaving her there, four feet from her call button — my hands were suddenly shaking. At 62, I can now recognize the belly burn of cortisol that has propelled me out of bed most days since I was — I don’t know — four, and I have come to understand that my nervous system is shot, done, fried like a hot wire, kaput. I hailed a yellow cab (not Mo’s) out on York Avenue, went back to Grand Central Station, and got on the next train home, almost two hours away. My mind was wandering, and literally just as I was thinking that I hadn’t spoken to my friend Katherine for a while, she texted me at that very instant. Has that ever happened to you? When you’re thinking of someone and suddenly, there they are? That’s what happened.
She’s been through it herself recently, and she’s another one I’d like to have tea and honey cake with on the regular, but she lives in another country across an ocean, so Yay for technology, which is sometimes a good thing. I told her what had happened, that my overwhelm was overwhelmed, and she said that I should look for the tiny corners, which I understood, and which made sense. I remembered being a kid and doing that very thing: crawling under a table, making myself small. And it worked. I could breathe, if only in little sips of air. And that was enough.
They were all tiny corners. Mo, his mother, his no-good rotten brother. Even the bike messenger. Even my mother’s makeup. Even the T-shirt that I’m bringing her tomorrow that says Not my first rodeo.
All of the personal, small stories in this vast, ridiculous world: they’re all tiny corners. Just the fact of them tethers us to the earth and to each other, and whether they’re good stories or bad, they still manage to keep us human when we’re grasping at straws. When I’m teaching, and my students say Oh my story isn’t big enough to be important, I tell them to tighten their monocular: the smaller the story, the more important it is.
I do not recommend getting run into by a bicycle messenger in Manhattan, but if you do manage to wind up in the same taxi driven by the same guy four times in a row, pay attention. And if he picks you up across the street from the Yale Club and his name is Mo, ask for his mother.
This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, the James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.
Images courtesy of the author.
The post Poor Man’s Feast: Beauty is the Language of Care appeared first on PRINT Magazine.