“…I think we’ll do out to dinner or something.”
“So, how did the interview go?”
“Great, really great…”
That’s all I heard, just that fragment of gentle chatter, because I glided down the Q Street escalator
out of earshot.
Michael—I know his name because he wears it on his shirt,
beneath the safety-yellow vest –hands out the Post Express every morning at the Metro entrance. As one of the last remaining home delivery subscribers, I carry my
paper with me and rarely take one from him, but we always greet each other with
a “good morning” or some comment about the weather. Michael is one of my stranger friends, or
more accurately he is a stranger-friend. (I do have some strange friends, but in this
case stranger is a noun and not an adjective.) He was chatting with a young
woman at the top of the Metro entrance, and it was clearly a follow-up to a
previous conversation. She had told him
about an interview; he remembered to ask about it. It went great! There's a dinner she's mulling with someone. They probably chat on this spot regularly, perhaps accompanied by a hand-off of free news.
He falls into a category similar to the “familiar stranger,”
a relationship first described in 1972 by a psychologist named Stanley
Milgram. A research project
devoted to this subject at UC Berkeley describes this relationship as so predictable
that we notice if our familiar strangers are not where they are supposed to
be. Michael went on vacation for two weeks in August and he made sure to tell his regulars. He knew they would notice his absence. But
That’s not the relationship I have with Michael. We do
interact, as he interacts with all the Q Street regulars, like the woman with
the successful interview. I have a lot
of stranger-friends, some closer than others. The thin woman with the tiny dog. The shopkeeper at the corner. He's a close stranger-friend. I owed him 9 cents for about a week after
dumping all my spare change out on the counter to pay for a half-gallon of milk. He knew I was good for it because I’m a
regular. I’m his stranger-friend.
My Old Town Alexandria neighborhood is full of
stranger-friends, and some familiar strangers.
Sometimes they come in pairs, one of each. At
least three times a week I pass a couple—and I do notice when it’s only one of
them—heading to west on Prince Street in the mornings when I’m walking
east. He never nods or smiles at me but
she always does. Sometimes when I see
her walking alone I’m tempted to ask, what’s with him? But that would be a breach of stranger-friend
protocol.
The city is constructed on these fine-grained relationships. They take place on the sidewalks, at the
thresholds, on the bus. More than taking
place, though, they actually make
place. Stranger-friendships can only
happen in the public realm, a crucial ingredient for a healthy and lovable
city. Like the inhabitants of Erisilia, one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, we are all connected
by a network of strings of varying density and strength.
