While I'm not old by any sane standards, by society's I am on the wane. So when I walk down the street or ride the bus I notice fewer eyes watching me. My body, fattened up from stints at grad school and a bout of law-school induced depression, has gained some anonymity and feels a little more mine in public. The little wrinkles around my eyes, though they are still shallow, I treat tenderly every morning with a dab of cream and smile at myself in the mirror, enjoying the way they frame my eyes as they scrunch.

The memories of his eyes on me, however, linger. He the man on the train, the bus, on the street.

He gave me his attention and I was supposed to feel flattered. His eyes on my hair, my breasts, my hands, my shoulders, my thighs. My hair. My tits. My shoulders and thighs and rainboots. In his eyes they felt vulnerable and scared; they did not enjoy his attention. They did not ask for nor consent to his attention.

Being a woman gazed at should not be so hard or scary, and yet, here we are.

My female friends all have stories of times they’ve been afraid just to be in public or private. The pretty ones, the plain ones, the fat and skinny ones, every woman can tell you her stories, if you’d ask.

There is a lot of anger in this female body, rage at how the rest of the world makes me feel when I’m out in it. A few weeks ago I convinced some friends to begin attending a cardio kickboxing class with me. We punch the air in unison in a room almost entirely filled with women. I jab left and my hand sails straight through emptiness, makes contact with nothing, and snaps back to my side. But I feel like I’m gaining strength for a time when it might meet an actual threat.

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." 

"None of us is alone."

After a confidence-destroying day I was possibly one of the grumpiest people on the 6 bus down to Hyde Park. But because I hopped on at the route's first stop I had my pick of seats, which was enough to buoy my spirits. At least, until the crucial final stop before the bus begins its express run to 47th.

As any frequent public transportation rider knows, getting a seat to yourself on the express part of the bus route is winning the city living lottery. So I've got my bag next to me, I'm staring hard out the window, and holding my breath as the bus pulls up to the last local stop. And then I see him: raggedy pants that are really more a collection of holes than trousers, dirty hands, pulling a suitcase on wheels behind him. He's not on his way from or to an airport, this much is clear. Back to staring hard out the window, hoping to make the seat next to me disappear.

"Can I sit here?" 

"Of course." I move my bag to my lap. He smells, like cigarette smoke and dirt and being outside all day. He's wearing a baseball cap, but I think I recognize him as one of the panhandlers I see in the Loop, on LaSalle. Now the bus is rolling again and if I want to move I have to step over him. But the next stop isn't for another 15 minutes and moving at this point would obviously be only to avoid this man. I don't have the heart to do such a thing, so I sit and I stare out the window hard again, this time hoping to make the cigarette smell go away. 

Beep. He starts a timer on his watch, or at least I think this is what's happened because I'm still staring outside, now at Lake Michigan. It's around 4pm and the bus, while fairly full, is very quiet. Well, except for something that sounds like plastic pieces being fitted inside each other. 

He's solving a Rubik's cube, and doing so very, very fast. Beep. 

"How long did it take you to finish?" I ask him. Tears are pooling at the bottom of my eyes, I can feel it, but I'm just going to pretend they're not there. The things that made my day shitty are not going to win, I tell myself. 

"Four minutes and twenty seconds." 

"Is that good?"

"I've done it faster, under three minutes. But this is very good."

"I've always wanted to be able to solve a Rubik's cube." This is not a lie. "But I've tried, and I just can't."

"You can. Don't ever say can't. Can you count to three?"

"Yeah."

"Prove it."

"... One, two, three?"

"Ok, you can solve a Rubik's cube." He points to the three layers, and deliberately, slow enough so I can follow along, begins to solve the first layer. 

He goes on to tell me that I need to get the brand-name Rubik's cube because the others fall apart too easily. The one he's holding looks structurally sound though the colored stickers are definitely fraying. 

"How did you get started with this hobby?"

"I was ending up in jail a lot. So now I always have this cube with me and I solve it when I'm sitting on the bus or waiting, so that my mind doesn't wander and I don't get in trouble." He washes cars downtown for food money now. I don't ask where he lives (or doesn't live). 

"I was having a terrible day, but seeing you solve that puzzle really cheered me up." The truth again. 

"My day was going badly too. I wash cars, but today it was raining." It had been raining on and off since 7am, when I got on the bus to go downtown. It hadn't stopped much, and when it did it was only to reenergize and start up again, worse than before. I imagine he didn't have any luck getting anyone to pay for a car wash. 

"I'm sorry to hear that." 

"It's okay. My regulars helped out." He points to the wheeled suitcase I'd noticed earlier: "That's full of food. When I left this morning I didn't know if I'd have anything to eat, but it worked out. I have food and I owe car-washes to my regulars. I got everything I have today, I didn't take anything." 

The bus is now near the end of the express stretch. It slows down and eases off Lake Shore Drive.

"Thanks for telling me about your Rubik's cube. I was sad but seeing you so fully engrossed in solving it made me happy."

"Talking to you made me happy too. It reminded me that we, none of us, is alone."

And at the corner of 53rd and S. Hyde Park he gets off the bus. 

“They haven’t been a problem. They just scare people.”

“They haven’t been a problem. They just scare people.” That's what a business owner in Columbia, South Carolina, the state capital, is quoted as saying about the city's homeless people, who are set to be harassed out of town. The proposed law, per the NYT: "Under the new strategy, the authorities will increase enforcement of existing vagrancy laws and offer the homeless three options: accept help at a shelter, go to jail or leave Columbia."

Well, now you know: homeless people are so repugnant — though not dangerous! even according to the horrible humans who support this law! — that they don't deserve to use the public streets. They deserve only bullying. On the plus side, the city council of Columbia has apparently found the singularity of homeless people and is able to make them disappear (because it's not like driving them out of this town will just make them homeless in another town, of course). Math! 

The article goes on to say that the councilman who wrote the proposal also suggested moving the homeless shelter up to 15 miles out of downtown, to protect business, naturally. The causal mechanism the councilman has in mind wherein people see homeless persons and then don't buy stuff because of it is unclear. If seeing homeless people scares you, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that maybe you don't deserve to have nice things and should not be allowed to shop anyway. 

When it's dangerous to call the police.

If you saw a police car outside at noon, would it make you feel more or less safe? I suspect your answer would change depending on what neighborhood you're in. If I saw a police car right now, I'd be scared; if I saw two, I might consider strolling in the opposite direction. While I have no reason to be afraid of the police, I know they don't frequent this area unless they have a reason. And police don't often have happy, friendly reasons to be somewhere. I've occasionally mentioned to friends my unease around police. Most of those from my milieu are confused: do I have a warrant out for my arrest? Have I ever given the police a reason to be suspicious? No and no. I even come to a complete stop at stop signs!

But police, their real and important public safety role aside, can oftentimes be the enemy of law-abiding people, especially minorities and especially women. The NYT has a short but important piece on how laws created to deal with violent gangs have made battered women afraid to call the police against their abusers. 

These laws, often local, force landlords to evict tenants if the police have been called to a rental more than a certain number of times in a given time period -- they're labeled nuisance properties. The public policy intent seems sound enough: to keep peace in a neighborhood, kick out the misbehavers. Reasonable. But this assumes that the victim and the aggressor aren't in the same apartment or house. And once again, battered women are treated as complicit in the crimes against them. Can we repeat that a thousand times until it's clear to everyone? Battered women and men are the victims. Even if you invite someone into your home, if they beat you up, you are the victim. 

Also, I realize that forcing landlords to deal with problem tenants makes the police's job in one area easier. But people, even trouble people, cannot be disappeared: if they leave one neighborhood, they're moving into another one. Even if you concede that the people being evicted "deserve" it, any public policy has to face the fact that these people will end up causing trouble in a rougher, tougher neighborhood. And that's not fair to the people who, by economics alone and not because they themselves are "trouble", are forced into these rougher, tougher neighborhoods.