this is why i live here

I often find myself going to work with this silly look on my face these days, which I could blame on daylight savings time, but is in truth the fault of a girl, and something tells me it rubs off on people. It's always difficult to get in in the morning, the ever crowded f-train full of people used to cramming up against one another and those who I know have done this commute for longer than I've lived here, but still betray no hint of common sense when it comes to rush hour.

Trying to balance coffee and magazine and holding onto rails so as not to fall into people, I must've been quite a site this morning. With my stop approaching, attempts to get a half read article on that absolute bastard of a supreme court justice antonin scalia [he oddly went to my father's high school] crammed back into my bag were comically unsuccessful.

Which is when the woman sitting directly in front of me, watching this epic struggle of man double-teamed by bag and new yorker issue, looks up and says something I have to ask her to repeat. "Can I hold that for you?" she offers. Why, yes, you can. Coffee is guarded by complete stranger, fat judge goes in my bag, and i thank the woman who at that instant was my favorite person in the world.

Then, always trying to link the things that happen to me to the words that matter, I remember Seamus Heaney's translation of the Greek Tragedy Philoctetes, called The Cure at Troy. And I smile at this woman and thank her, and my eyes wide behind lenses she can't see through thank her nonetheless. And I half want to tell her what I've had memorized for awhile now:

There's a whole economy of kindness
Possible in the world; befriend a friend
And the chance of it's increased and multiplied.

Point being, go do something nice for someone today.