I hate editors’ confessionals. The manufactured vulnerability, the self-effacing humor, the tidy moral of the story—it’s cringe-inducing. But here I am, about to let one fly, because I have to fill this space and this episode has been bothering me since it happened, which was on New Year’s Day.
I hate editors’ confessionals. The manufactured vulnerability, the self-effacing humor, the tidy moral of the story—it’s cringe-inducing. But here I am, about to let one fly, because I have to fill this space and this episode has been bothering me since it happened, which was on New Year’s Day.
It was a dark and stormy night. The world was hung over. As I drove up a long, lonely slog of road on my way to the grocery store, I caught sight of a dismounted cyclist pushing a bike along the shoulder. A breakdown! My car has a bike rack, less because we’re avid cyclists than because we’re too lazy to take it off. An idea dawned.
First, though, a quick calculation. It was dark and I was a single woman. But the bike had one of those flashing taillights, and I spied a helmet on the rider. Bike commuter/murderer? Bike
commuter/murderer? “Bike commuter” won out, and everyone knows bike commuters are good citizens. Fairly rubbing my hands over the glut of good karma coming my way, and full of Jerry Seinfeld-like self-congratulations (“Who else would do something like this?”), I turned my car around to rescue this victim of misfortune.
It was after I’d set the hazards and actually seen the cyclist that I realized I’d made certain assumptions, and that I’m quite possibly kind of a racist. Whereas I’d apparently been picturing a tall, lanky white student in his 20s or 30s, someone who could be a nephew or a cousin, the person before me was in fact short and slight, black, missing teeth and reeking of booze. He veered unsteadily. My mind scrabbled for a way out. Maybe, if the only problem was that he was wasted, I could leave with a clean conscience. I asked if he was OK.
“No, I’m not OK,” he said miserably. “I’m old.”
I don’t know why, but that answer reassured me. Everyone hates getting old. He loaded his bike onto the rack and I drove him to the bus station. His mother had just died, and we talked about the pain of losing a parent. At the bus station we said goodbye and I went home, where my husband listened, horrified, to my tale and yelled at me for picking up strangers. It was
idiotic, and I promised not to do it again. But it wasn’t the very worst way to start out the new year.
