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.
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