I took my daughter into Manhattan to go to museums and reacquiant her with the city generally. She was in fifth grade and curious about everything. At the end of the day, as we were standing in line at the Port Authority waiting for our bus back to the suburbs, a man who had been in the writers' workshop came walking down the line. At each person he stopped and tried to sell a copy of Street News. He was wearing layers of semi-disintegrating clothes and he had his hair in short, multidirectional corkskrew dreadlocks. Most of the people he went up to did the usual thing of recoiling slightly and looking away. When he got to us, he recognized me, and we began to talk. I asked how he was doing and he said pretty well--he had written a piece for Street News and it had been published recently. He asked if the workshop would be starting again soon, and he said he'd be there. I bought a copy of Street News for myself and another for my daughter and said I'd see him in the spring, and we got on our bus. When we arrived home, my wife asked my daughter how she liked the city. "It was pretty good," she said. "Not much happened. At the bus station, we ran into a friend of Daddy's."
The little girl's description of her trip to New York brought tears to my eyes. How amazing that she spends the day seeing the city's impressive buildings, its collections, and what she finds remarkable is this small, human connection--one that most people around her rebuffed.
