Strangers on a Train

“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

These are not words I live by in the slightest.  Which I guess makes it kind of fake, as my students would say, that I bought a tote bag donning the motto at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris the other day. 

The bookstore was meeting place for Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway, and I owed my teenage self a souvenir. I was the post-World War I ex-pat writers’ biggest fan at age 17, due in small part to my dissent over the Iraq War but mostly because my beautiful AP English teacher thought Hemingway was really cool, and I thought she was really cool.

But I digress.  I’ve been hoping no strangers have read the quote on the side of my tote bag while I was busy being wildly standoffish to them, as I don’t wish to be thought of as unintentionally ironic.

I think I’m quite friendly to servers, baristas, flight attendants: people with whom my interactions follow an understood pattern and have an expected end.  However, I am not as friendly to people sitting next to me on the train or at the bar.  Small talk makes me anxious. If I exchange pleasantries, I think, what if they keep talking to me? What if I don’t know how to make it stop?

People love to quote Blanche’s exclamation at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire:  “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” but sometimes they seem to be forgetting that when she says this, she is in a straight-jacket, being taken away to an insane asylum.  It’s a testament to the lunacy of trust, to the unlikelihood of serendipity.  The kindness of strangers hasn’t served her very well at all. 

I don’t mean to imply that I’m fearful of strangers; rather, I’m doubtful.  I find myself expecting the worst from small talk.  What if I have to hear about someone’s asinine politics? What if, when I say what my job is, they use phrases like “oh, you teach those kinds of kids” or say “oh man, I always hated English class” (you’d be surprised how eager people are to tell me this.  I don’t understand what response they could possibly be expecting).  And of course, when men strike up a conversation, I never give them the benefit of the doubt, but instead go all stereotypical-lesbian and assume the worst of their intentions. 

I found out at the entrance to an old fortress in Nafplio, Greece, that I haven’t been hiding my skepticism of friendly strangers as well as I thought.  A Greek guy struck up a conversation with me.  I kept throwing out my characteristic polite-yet-conclusive comments, but he wasn’t having it.  Not because he couldn’t tell what I was doing, but because he could.  He crossed his arms (oh, to see yourself parodied) and grinned, switching to a falsetto that probably sounded exactly like me. “Hi, how are you? Oh I’m fine, how are you?” I smiled obligingly, you-got-me style. 

He continued. “I know how it is in America, I’ve been, people there, how you say, make walls.”  The impermeable stone fortress of Nafplio stood impressively behind him as if in illustration.  “Here in Greece, we connect.  We are real to each other.  Maybe it’s cultural.  I don’t know why. ”

So in the interest of cultural open-mindedness, if nothing else, I’m trying to live up to the trite yet substantial challenge posed by my tote bag, and give myself over to small talk more often.  The impact is more than what it would be back home, because the interactions with strangers are the only interactions I have here.  The most invigorating conversation I have, the kindest thing I say, and the most profound connection I make in a given day will all inevitably involve strangers. And if, like any traveler, I hope to receive kindness, the kindness of strangers is pretty much the only option.  So let’s hope Blanche wasn’t so crazy after all.