Stranded. A stranger. An alien to the concrete jungle that surrounds me; no one cares who I am or what I do. Lost.
When I first moved to New York City, my banking system was all messed up. Not only did I not have a physical debit card—lost in a mail transaction—but my credit card would not work and I had no cash on me. In order to fix the situation, I would have to take a car, ferry and subway to get to the nearest bank. However, I lacked essential resources—a metro card. I didn’t really put it all together—that I was lost, alone, and with no form of payment—until I was high and dry at Whitehall and South Ferry. After that realization, I kind of just lost it. I frantically called Wells Fargo and searched for spare change on the streets of New York. Nothing was working. So I cried. In actuality, probably not the smartest plan of attack, but hey, shit happens.
Feeling sad and vulnerable, I sat on a park bench in Battery Park questioning what to do. A man next to me noticed my behavior and asked me what was wrong.
I began explaining to him the chaos of my problems, and although I thought he cared, in reality he didn’t; he “listened” to me as he was playing on his stupid telephone. Who was this asshole of a man and why was I wasting my time? By the end of telling this elaborate story, I was annoyed. Until, he looked up from his phone.
While I was telling him my horrible situation, I thought he wasn’t listening, but he was. Even more than that, he looked up the exact subway track I had to take to get to a bank in addition too pulling out an old metro card from his wallet. The metro card, he explained, had less than $5 on it, which was just the amount I needed to get to the bank.
He didn’t really say much. He didn’t really feel sympathy. He just handled it over.
And there, in Battery Park, my feeling of being an outsider evolved.
I was no longer lost.
Shortly after he gave me his ticket, I ran off. I turned around before fleeing, with big tears in my eyes, and said “Thank you, thank you so much.” He responded in such a classic New Yorker way. He said, “Please stop crying.”
I am able to look beyond the stupidity of the whole situation on my part, and realize how incredibly grateful I am of that man. He adjusted the idea to me of the power of an overwhelming city.
Said best by Ernst Mayr, "One can be a stranger in a big city, and it is the companionship and later friendship that is the most important thing to achieve, in order to succeed."
I tell this story now, because not only is it a situation I have grown from and am able to reflect upon, but also, that savior of a subway ticket just expired. I think it’s a nice culmination of the adjustment period I had for not only becoming a college student, but also, becoming street-smart in New York City. I am now ready to thrive in the mayhem of Manhattan, while always keeping my head on my shoulders.
To the man who helped me: thank you, thank you so much.
