Walks in the Park

It's tough not to like a place where everyone calls you darlin'. Not in a #MeToo kind of patronizing way, not in a way that suggests you're insignificant. Quite the opposite, actually. If anything, it's the otherwise invisible people who call you that, the waitresses and the busboys and the streetcar conductors and the check out clerks in the grocery store.

Okay, it's not just the darlin' thing that makes me love New Orleans. It's the way they do food so well. It's the chicory in the coffee. It's the perpetually buckled streets that force the traffic to move slowly. The alcohol, the music, the tongue in cheek art. It's the inevitable mosaic of humanity, even on streets lined with stately mansions.

We were walking through Audubon Park, my daughter and I, and I could not stop wondering about the gentleman in front of us. He walked at a decent pace but with a limp. He was tall and thin, with a robin's egg blue and white striped rugby style shirt tucked into his baggy work-out pants. The shirt reminded me of a shirt I had in college, in the seventies, when either those shirts were in vogue or I just dressed that way, for some reason.

I never saw the man's face, but I assumed he was older -- not necessarily that much older than I, but at least a little bit. It struck me that he was young, or at least younger, once. In the seventies, when I was wearing boyish rugby style shirts on my late blooming body, this man was young and strong, without a limp. That's what I kept thinking anyway.

I shared my thoughts with my daughter, concerned that she might think I was doing that crazy mom thing again, going somewhere in my head she had no interest in visiting. I forget, sometimes, that she's grown up now, not only wiser than I am but a person to whom I can even turn for advice. She nodded about the limping man in front of us, and told me she often wonders what kind of day people are having. Faces are generally blank, hiding the fears and the crises and the struggles of the day, but she finds herself keenly aware that everybody walks around with a headful of thoughts, sometimes good, sometimes not so much. To realize that is to know how important it is to treat people well, even in passing. How important it is to call people darlin', and how nice it is to be on the receiving end of such a random kindness.

Yesterday, back north where people tend to keep their darlin's to themselves, I sat in a restaurant, eating lunch while I worked. A young woman at the table across from me was already sipping a martini while she waited for her salad. We smiled at each other, silently. Good for her, I thought, a martini at three o'clock. When I looked up at her again, she was talking quietly on her phone, crying, using the edges of her napkin to wipe her eyes. I wanted to go over to her when she put down her phone, tell her I had one of those days last week, and would no doubt have another one in the future. I wanted to tell her it would all be okay, call her darlin'. I didn't, but I was reminded of how complicated everything can be behind a smile, or a scowl, for that matter.

I think back to the gentleman in Audubon Park, limping, in the robin's egg blue and white striped rugby style shirt. That's all I know about him, which is really nothing at all.