Asking questions, and listening to the answers.

Four weeks ago on a muggy summer night I took a small notebook and my keys and started walking. After I'd tired myself from looping the same empty streets east and west I crept up to a picnic table on the sidewalk patio of a closed restaurant and, seeing no one who might mind, I took a seat. There's a 24-hour Dunkin Donuts down the block. While it does get decent traffic, at this hour hardly any of it is by foot, leaving me to contend with the night and my thoughts alone.

Before I heard her, I smelled her cigarette. She was carrying a small cross-shoulder purse, a rain jacket was tied around her waist, and a bandana was nesting in her hair. Nothing was unusual about her appearance except for the time she was appearing at, a little past 11 p.m. on a Tuesday on a block that doesn't give one much reason to be out at that time. She asked if she could sit down at the table. Except for asking her to wait until she'd finished the cigarette, I couldn't see any reason not to consent. We talked a little. She asked me if I was writing a letter — I was making to-do and grocery lists, but I'll gladly lie to a stranger if it promotes whimsy — and then she added that I should be writing a letter, because someone misses me. 

She seemed to sense how far my patience for strangers extends and left while the encounter was still a pleasant eccentricity. We shook hands, she told me her name, and after she'd turned away I wrote the name down in my notebook because it seemed somehow fitting.

This past Tuesday I was again on that block. Mugginess and warmth had already packed up and left Chicago, so I was doing my list-making inside the Dunkin Donuts. While there's much to love about Dunkin Donuts at midnight, their music is not one of those things. My headphones were in so I didn't immediately register that someone was speaking to me.

"Can you help me buy something to eat?"

After she finished the question, her eyes lit up with recognition. But while she recognized me within seconds, I recognized her within half a second.

"Shannon, right?" 

From our previous encounter, I'd figured her for an eccentric, not white-collar but not a person who has to ask strangers for something as essential as her next meal. Previously I had asked her whether she enjoys, as I do, walking along commercial streets at night, enchanted by the gradual draining away of bustle. Obviously I had not paid enough attention to her answers if I missed something so foundational about her life like "is reduced to relying on the generosity of strangers for food."