Joan Didion was standing on Central Park's SummerStage
last week, reading from her book The Year of
Magical Thinking, in her distinctive, depressive monotone, when a rain cloud
cracked open above the pastoral park scene. One minute
I was part of an audience that was lounging and
listening, and then suddenly we were barreling for the
exit, leaving poor Joan Didion still reading on stage
as we sprinted toward onto nearest mode of
transportation--the crosstown M72.
I had no reason to travel to Manhattan's West Side,
but the bus was dry, I was wet, my soggy paperback was
coming apart against my stomach where I had tried to
protect it underneath my shirt, and so I let myself be
pushed by the crowd onto the over-air-conditioned bus.
I was tuned into the bus chatter in a way you can be
only when you travel in the city alone, undistracted
by the details of your own life, or by the pages of a
book. These were the moments when you eavesdropped on
other people's lives.
"I look like I jumped into a bathtub in all of my
clothes!" yelled a woman on a cell phone, describing
the scene to someone who was presumably warmer and
drier than she. It struck me as a funny analogy-- to
describe the common occurrence of getting soaked in a
rainstorm in terms of the more unusual act of jumping
into a bathtub fully dressed.
"FEMA's on its way to New York to save us!" yelled out
an overweight man to my right, to no one in particular
and to everyone at once.
"Yeah, Brownie's coming! He'll do a heck of a job!"
came a muffled response from the back of the bus, and
everyone laughed. Alone on a crosstown bus to the
wrong side of town, wet and cold, I suddenly felt
deeply connected to my fellow passengers.
Why? Because the strangers on the bus had an inside
joke together--about Brownie, about the heck of a job
he would do. And I laughed not because it was a funny
joke, but to signify that I was in on the reference,
that I was a part of this 21st century world. I
laughed because it was easier to laugh in the moment
than to notice that the breezy bus banter hinted at a
master narrative where crisis lurked on the horizon
and we knew that on some level, nobody could save us,
and it really wasn't so funny at all.
When I was growing up, my parents had to force me to
take any interest current events. I knew that I was
supposed to be informed about the world I lived in,
but the interest didn't come naturally. To even glance
above the newspaper's fold, I had to feign a curiosity
that I didn't possess. Later, in college, I argued that it was more useful to
spend the time one wasted reading newspapers
volunteering at a soup kitchen. After all, how many of
us who follow the news ever do anything with the
information besides bring it up when conversation gets
slow at dinner?
But on the crosstown M72, when a group of wet New
Yorkers shared a knowing laugh over a relatively
humorless common reference, I understood that knowing
what is happening in the world-- following a story that
is larger than one's personal preoccupations--is to be
a part of the world.
The moment simply wouldn't have packed the same punch
had someone quoted a well-known movie or television
reference that made the people on the bus share a
laugh. It mattered that this reference was not to a
fictional something, but to the very real world. It
raised the stakes.
There seemed something important about sharing a
moment with a busload of strangers that had nothing to
do with my job, my love life, my schedule, my
anything! It was a healthy reminder that the world was
large, and that all of us were living in it and
fearing it and laughing at it and listening to it
together. Many little lives. All together in a big,
wet world. Knowing about the world and sharing that
knowledge with strangers made me feel a piece of it.