Steve Kupferman

Why I Pushed the Old Lady

It was a Friday afternoon, a few weeks ago, and I'd finished all the work I needed to get done before the weekend. The weather was crisp, but not frigid, so I decided to go for a walk.

I made a loop around the neighborhood, bought some fruit, and was just about to stop at the Korean supermarket, when, just in front of said supermarket, someone said something to me. She was an old Asian lady in a wheelchair, all bundled up against the cold. Her face was plump, but sallow and droopy, and she looked very frail. In an incongruously bohemian touch, her head was covered with a floppy red felt beret. Whatever she was saying was barely audible, and heavily accented, too, but when I leaned closer I could make out one word: "Honest... Honest..."

The wheelchair wasn't motorized, and she didn't look like she'd be able to make it anywhere under her own power. I made the necessary conclusion.

"You want me to push you to Honest Ed's?" I asked.

The old lady nodded and cooed in what I took to be the affirmative.

This was an unusual request, and it warranted some consideration. If she'd been asking for money, I probably wouldn't have given her any, but that's because I don't have enough money. She didn't want that; she wanted me, and my time, which I happened to have in abundance. And in any case, one of the reasons to choose life in a city over life somewhere more sparsely populated is the availability of chance encounters with people one wouldn't otherwise meet, and so, to a certain way of thinking, my deciding not to push this lady to Honest Ed's would have been a waste of a perfectly good opportunity for urban adventure.

Honest Ed's was a couple blocks away, opposite the direction I was headed, but the lady was clearly in need of help. She obviously didn't have any sort of caretaker available to her or she wouldn't have been prevailing upon a stranger. There was no way I could turn her down.

Also, just so none of what follows seems like me congratulating myself on my supposed altruism, know that at no point while it was going on was I not planning on writing about it afterward. That was going to be my reward.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go."

I grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and began to push the old lady towards Honest Ed's. There was no further communication between us, not because there was nothing to say, but because for either of us to say anything in a way the other could have understood would have been next to impossible.

The old lady had been shopping. I knew this because the wheelchair was loaded up like an Afghani pack mule. Plastic bags drooped off the handles, all of them straining with the weight of whatever was inside. Something in one of them had an aroma like a fish that had died in a grease fire. Whatever kind of food it was, I'm sure it would have been tasty when fresh, but it had clearly been moldering in a takeout container for a little while by the time I encountered it. The smell was unpleasant, and memorably so. As it turned out, everything I ate for the next few days tasted faintly of burning seafood.

The whole time we were walking to Honest Ed's, my greatest anxiety was that we'd run into someone I know, and I'd have to somehow quickly explain the situation. There would have been no single sentence I could have spoken that would have completely answered the obvious questions: who is this lady, how did you meet her. I decided I'd introduce her as a friend if it came down to it, and hope whoever I was talking to didn't ask any followup questions, like what her name was.

I'll admit to feeling a certain amount of relief when we reached Bloor and Markham, the northwest corner of the Honest Ed's compound. "Okay," I said. "Is this okay? Can you make it inside on your own?"

The old lady said nothing. She just pointed to the right, south along Markham, and made a back-of-throat noise, as if to say: keep going.

Either there had been some misunderstanding, or she was craftier than I'd taken her for. Had she tricked me into walking a longer detour than I'd originally anticipated? Maybe I was dealing with a pro.

But here's where I'll credit myself with some unadulterated personal decency: I couldn't bring myself to abandon an old lady on a street corner by Honest Ed's. I simply could not countenance the idea of leaving her at the mercy of people looking for deals on crockery and off-brand SPAM.

We started south on Markham. The plastic shopping bags were beginning to sag and rub against the wheels of the chair as we moved. I stopped, apologized, and tried to move them around, but they were so densely arranged that there really weren't more than a couple centimeters of wiggle room to work with. It seemed impossible that the old lady could have managed to load herself up with so many groceries on her own, and I began to wonder whether or not I was the first passer-by she'd enlisted as an ad-hoc personal assistant that day.

At the first couple major intersections, I leaned down and asked her how much further we still had to go, but her answers were vague. "One more block?" I'd say, and she'd nod. And then when we'd walked the block, she'd point southward again. Only she knew where we were ultimately bound, and her only means of sharing that information with me was pantomime.

At one point, she dug a hand into her coat pocket and produced a pineapple-flavored sucking candy, which she handed to me wordlessly, without looking back, as if to say there would be more where that came from.

We made it down to College Street and the old lady thrust her left arm out to indicate "east." We passed Kensington Market and she pointed me north onto a side street, and we finally arrived at a retirement community. I wheeled her into the lobby and she stood up out of her chair, with difficulty, and started rummaging through her coat pockets. She pulled out two more sucking candies and put them in my hand. In fairness, they were more material compensation than I was expecting, and, since they were individually wrapped, I did eat them later.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you."

And so I said, you're welcome.

In all, we'd walked about two kilometres. I'm not sure I would have embarked on the whole adventure if I'd understood, from the beginning, how long it was going to take, and I don't know that my help made much of a difference to the lady. She seemed to be in need of a lot more than a push home.

But in spite of our lack of a common language, we both understood that a push was all I would give.

The Complete Collection

Yeah, lots of people have "Save Transit City" buttons. David Miller and Adam Giambrone were handing them out to everyone who would take them during the first great funding scare, last spring.

My own STC button was given to me at a Torontoist staff meeting by David Topping, who'd gotten a bag of them from Giambrone, who at the time was apparently keeping a huge box of them in the trunk of his car. (Actually, it turns out this is only half true. See below.)

Now that saving Transit City is fashionable again, I'm pretty stoked that I have not only that original button, but the entire Transit City line of apparal.

Aw yeah.

The other five buttons are offical TTC swag. Over the summer (and maybe before then), they were being handed out at public events by TTC representatives as a way of building public awareness of the plan.

I would never wear any of these in public. Advocacy and activism aren't my department.

But they're on prominent display in my apartment, as living artifacts of the light rail shitstorm.

Update:

David Topping tells me that he did not, in fact, get his supply of Save Transit City buttons from Adam Giambrone. In reality, he got them from another person, whom Adam Giambrone directed him to. Also, the buttons were in bags, rather than "a huge box." Oops. That's what I get for writing about half-remembered conversations from months ago.

Sorry for misleading you, internet. And apologies for misparaphrasing you, David.

The Remainder of Chanukah

Chanukah is over, but I figured I'd talk about the rest of the contents of gift-box-from-mom 2010.

Night four was a book, Ahab's Wife, that mom had read and liked.

Night five was a braided leather belt, and also a Toronto Blue Jays t-shirt, which mom had bought in Albany, on impulse. "It was just sitting there on the rack, on sale," she told me. "Obviously there's not much demand in New York for that type of thing."

Night six was a v-neck argyle sweater from Old Navy.

Night seven was Ladder of Years, by Anne Tyler, an author I accidentally introduced mom to when she asked me to pick her up an audiobook from the Clifton Park-Halfmoon public library and I chose A Slipping Down Life, also by Tyler, because I'd watched the film adaptation of the book on the Sundance channel the day before. It's about a girl who carves a rock musician's name into her forehead with a broken mirror shard, and then somehow ends up marrying him, which I guess would be convenient, because it would mitigate the need to explain the forehead carving. I've never actually read anything by Anne Tyler, though, or mentioned A Slipping Down Life in the several years since the whole audiobook incident. I guess the book must have caught mom's eye.

Night eight was a checked shirt from Old Navy. I think I'm supposed to pair it with the sweater from night six, but I didn't ask mom about that.

Chanukah, Nights Two and Three

Night two's gift was The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie. It's a first edition, pretty nice. I like hardcover books. Presents are great.

On night three, there were two seperate packages for me to open, one marked "3a," and the other marked "3b." I opened 3b first, probably contravening the logic of the grand reveal. It was a cannister of some nice-smelling tea. 3a was a little cherry-red vacuum flask with a built-in tea strainer and splash-guard lid. It has rubber gaskets around its seals, and so I think it'll be leak-proof enough to throw in my messenger bag along with books and papers.

I haven't had a chance to thank mom for the flask yet, so I'll do it publicly, on the internet:

Thanks, mom.

This is the latest in a long tradition of utilitarian gifts from mom. Two Chanukahs ago she gave me a sturdy webbing belt from Patagonia (the activewear company, not the region of South America) that I now use to hold up my pants on a regular basis, and am wearing right now. Last Chanukah, she sent me a scarf that made my first winter as a commuter cyclist more bearable. Once, when I was probably eight years old, she gave me a label maker. I still haven't figured that one out.

Chanukah, Night One

Every year, my mother sends me a box with eight Chanukah gifts inside, each one fully wrapped and numbered from one to eight, so I open it on the appropriate night. I'm twenty-six, but I guess one is never too old for presents. Or maybe one IS too old for presents, but still enjoys them anyway? One doesn't know.

There's a certain amount of temptation just to open everything at once and then lie about it later, but I've learned over the years that anticipation is usually the best part.

Last night was the first night of Chanukah. This is what mom got me:

An electric menorah, with flickering bulbs. Apparently both my sisters also received this as a night-one gift. Mom used to run the synagogue gift shop, so she has hookups for buying this type of thing. I have no doubt it's a high-quality electric menorah. But even so, I was a little perplexed. I've been getting by just fine with candle power all these years.

"I thought it would be safer," mom told me when I called her.

Ah.