My husband and I were seated on the 4 train shuttling us at top speed on our way to a friend’s book launch in Brooklyn. At rush hour on a Wednesday, the subway car was packed. Across from us was a fellow with almost balding, light brown hair, a man you might not notice in the normal course of the day. He was carrying a large plastic bag in one hand and holding on to the pole with the other hand.
There was an odd noise at the far end of the car. A high pitched “Oooo.” It looked to be coming from a woman about forty, with long black hair that might have been a wig. She was heading slowly our way. “Oooo,” there it was again.
The next thing happened very quickly. The man at the pole pulled open his department store bag in a desperate sort of way. A cardboard lid fell on the floor and paper stuffing that he kicked out with his feet. He struggled to pull out a sneaker. It looked to be a man’s size sneaker, not a runner’s sneaker. It had a white rubber sole and daisies painted on the canvas.
“Oooo,” the woman was now a full body length away.
I saw the man extend his arm with the sneaker at the end of it. The woman reached for it and dropped it on the floor. That’s when I noticed her naked foot on the subway floor on this frigid night. The foot wiggled into the sneaker that was fully laced and much too long.
She took the other sneaker. Wiggled into it. Then she shuffled back to the other end of the car. It seemed to me that the man was in a kind of shock at this story in which he was a protagonist.
He picked up the empty plastic and debris and left the train at the next stop. The car was quiet. As if no one had seen what had happened. A young woman on the other side of my husband whispered, “Cool.”
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I can’t forget this moment on the NYC subway. Homeless people live in Grand Central Station and on the city’s subways, especially in the cold of winter. They live in the streets of San Francisco, in parks, and around our lives, wherever it is we live. We don’t often see them—or choose not to see them. For more information you can contact www.coalitionforthehomeless.org in New York and in other communities.