Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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  A little old lady next to me on the 44 keeps a firm grip on the hand rails even while seated. We start talking as we pass Clancy's Christmas tree lot.
   "The trees are almost up."
  The pines and firs are still bound with twine and stacked like cords of wood. The lot will be a magical symmetrical geometric forest wonderland just after thanksgiving. People will browse aisles of trees arranged by size.
   "It seems to start earlier every year," she remarked.
   "Yeah! I went into a Macy's once the WEEK AFTER Halloween and Christmas decorations were up!"
  She laughs. She strikes me as a patient quiet woman. She moves economically. Her hair is the color of concrete.
   "They're so greedy," she says.
   "Well, in terms of retail, this is a cash crop."
  We smile and cruise along, shoulder to shoulder.
  Our bus pulls up to my corner.
   "Well, this is my stop. Have a great evening."
   "You, too. Bye."

Dear Buddha,
Can my desires be relinquished?
Or will I only learn to stop expressing them?
Did you trick us?
Love,
-Suhail.

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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  A woman with bio-chem flash cards on the M train headed to SFstate. Her long legs were crossed. They ended in black suede shoes with a single strap and chunky heels. They were embroidered with a subtle floral vine, dark green and black. She had on a matching dress and her dark hair was up in the perfectly careless yet sexy bun of a woman studying. She had an intent face that looked like it would pounce on you with loveliness if she smiled.
  "Are you studying for a test?" I asked her.
  "Yeah at 11 o'clock."
  "Hey, that's any second now."
  We talked about her test and how I recognized the flash cards because of my sisters bio-chem studies; polygons with chemical monograms on them NaCl, O2, - connected by short parallel lines. She is interested in bioremediation.
  "What's that?"
  "Welllike when there's an oil spillbioremediation is finding chemical compounds that can break down the crude oil."
  "So it becomes biodegradable?"
  "Yeah! she smiled. It pounced.
  "Thats cool. It's retaining a biochemical equilibrium in nature."
  "Close enough, totally."
  We crossed the street onto the campus.
  "Good luck on your test."
  "Thank you. Bye."

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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  I was waiting for the 43 on Presidio at Clay. A woman came running through the crosswalk, smiling sweetly and waving meekly at stopped traffic. She halted at the bus stop, huffing and puffing. She was a thin, small Vietnamese woman. Her hair was short and flat. It was black with a few salty gray sprinkles. She smiled sweetly at me and looked up the block, the bus search stance.
   "You made it!" I exclaimed.
   "43," she said, smiling, pointing at the MUNI sign.
   "Yeah," I responded, smiling back at her. The bus was not coming. "You're early," I continued.
   We stood in silence as she caught her breath. Cars at the intersection stopped, looked, and rolled; stopped, looked, and rolled. It was a hot summer day in San Francisco. The yellow sun was brilliant in the blue sky. A wispy, patchy fog set the daylight on a random dimmer. There was a cool coastal breeze shooting through the intersection. After several minutes, I asked her if she was going to work.
   "43," she said, smiling.
   "Yeah! You didn't even need to run," I joked.
She didn't speak a lick of English. She had a seat on the sidewalk to rest properly after her run. She beckoned to me and patted the ground. I joined her and sat down. We rested and, because a watched pot never boils, the 43 immediately came. We laughed and got up to board. She smiled her irrepressible, sweet, unconditional smile when she flashed the driver her fastpass. There was an empty seat behind her on the bus. She gestured to that free seat behind her with an open hand, inviting me to the spot as though she'd saved it for me. I took the seat she saved. We rode in silence. She waved goodbye when she got off. It made me think of how easily friendships are started, with a show of kindness.
   A few stops after little miss sweetly got off the 43, we rolled through the UCSF campus. A grade school field trip boarded the bus. A dozen 2nd grade children boarded the 43. One of the little boys strutted and looked around unabashedly because he could tell that the entire population of that bus was sitting in two aisles of tidy rows facing forward just to watch his adorable march onto the bus. I love children because they walk with their whole bodies. He swung his arms, turned his head, and cast his feet forward insouiously.
   The little girl behind him was anxious an an itch. She wore a pink sweatsuit and a backpack the size of her torso. Her brow was furrowed with concentration. She would not take a step unless she was holding onto a pole or handrail and reaching for the next one.
   How does a physical body manifest the personality it houses?

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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  A bum on the N train:
  He spoke frenetically and kept shifting his weight from foot to foot and leg to leg. He spoke of nothing but technical matters of the train.
   "All right! Switching to tunnel mode now! Okay!"
He checked his watch and touched his hands and shifted his weight. He tapped on the standing bars.
   "These trains can get up to 90 miles per hour. Next stop, Van Ness station!"
  He spoke until he got off at civic center.

-

  I'm on the N train headed downtown. I notice a tiny leak, probably from condensation on the A/C. Residual water is collecting into a drop on the ceiling. The drop gets heavy and falls onto the baseball cap of the man next to me. He's a frumpy pear-shaped man wearing jeans and a khaki windbreaker. Another drop splashes on his cap.
   "Excuse me," I said "there's water dripping from the ceiling. It's hitting your hat . . . in case you want to move."
   "It's better than Fresno."
  Now THAT'S funny. Having no response, I smile. He turns toward me. The next drop falls on his shoulder. "In Fresno, on a Sunday, you have to wait an hour for the bus to come by."
   "Yeah . . . my sister was in Fresno for one of her rotations some time back. She was a medical student at UCSF."
  He is just on his way home from UCSF, it turns out. He's heading home to Fresno tonight. We complain about and marvel at the transit adventure between Fresno and San Francisco. A train to Richmond, then BART into the city, then a transfer to the N, and a ride to the front door of the UCSF medical center. A long trip.
   "My wife is at UCSF," he tells me.
   "That's excellent . . . oh wait - student or patient?"
   "Patient. She had her leg amputated above the knee."
  I was dumbstruck. He continued.
   "There is a problem with an infection so we came to UCSF."
   "Wow . . . well, she's in good hands."
  He reaches into his jacket. He's rummaging through an inside pocket.
"Do you know how much a room at the Marriott downtown costs?"
  This makes me laugh. "I don't think I want to know!"
  He finally pulls a folded piece of paper out of his khaki windbreaker and enunciates with suspense: "Two hundred and forty nine dollars." He let the number hang in the air. "But I got a room for seventy-nine. Have you heard of hotelsanywhere.com?"
   "Wow . . . no."
  And just like that, racing through the downtown tunnel at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour, I trip into a commercial. The man from Fresno tells me about a discount hotel website that consistently saves him a pretty penny. I listen attentively. Water drips onto his hat and shoulder. He pays it no mind. He is candid as a summer afternoon.

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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 A quiet mod girl is sitting on a bench in the Forest Hill station. She has a tin lunchbox covered with sitcom heroes from my childhood. The lunchbox is about as old as she is.
 'Where did you get that lunchbox?' I enquire.
 'At a garage sale.'
 'I haven't seen Mork and Mindy in a long time.'
 'It hasn't been on for a long time.'

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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 I was in line at the post office.
 'Hello.' I said to the man in line in front of me.
 'Do I know you?' he asked.
 'Not at all!' I laughed. We started talking.
 He is 89 years old. He is wearing a straw cowboy hat, a red and white horizontally striped golf shirt, and beige trousers. He recently returned from a national stand up comedy competition in Vegas. The contest had all different age categories. He was in the oldest.
 'I want them to have a 90 and above category.'
 'Then you can go back next year!' I say.
 'I won the local competition.' He explained this by tracing a quick circle with his finger. They sent him to Las Vegas. 'Four days, all expenses...food, room, all of it!' He had a blast. The topper: it was hosted by Debbie Reynolds of 'Singing In The Rain' fame. He hit on her at the mixer and got a big laugh.

 By the way, my landlady is hilarious. She's a light sleeping widow that walks around heavily for a while if I wake her up at night with any noise. She's got a toy poodle named Cookie. She has a 28 year old son still living at home and trying on his balls. Cookie yaps incessantly at the slightest motion about the house. Once he left a turd near the doorstep to my apartment, which is an in-law under the house, so I enter through the garage. So the turd was in their own garage, too.
  I walked by it on the way to work because I don't clean up other people's dogshit. I got home that night and it was still there. The next day, it was still there. Late that day, before I left for work, I wrote a note. I put a paperweight on the note and placed it right next to the turd. Soon as I got home that night, I found the turd gone, cleaned up lickety split. The note was gone, too. The note said. "Is this one of Cookie's chocolate chips? :)" [yes, with a smiley face.] Gosh, they're weird.

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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On the M train outbound. I'm sitting two seats away from a woman in black jeans and a black jacket. She has black hair to her shoulders and a black bag. We are both wearing headsets. We are both tapping our feet and bobbing our heads to our private music. Sometimes the tapping matches. She takes off her black headset and packs it away into her black bag.
'Hi,' I said.
'Hello.'
'What were you listening to?'
'The Grosse Point Blank Soundtrack.'
We talk about music a bit. She is on her way to the gym at Stonestown.
'The one by the tuxedo place?' I ask.
'Yeah, that one.'
'When my sister got married, we got the tuxedos there.'
'I've been going to that gym for 10 years. I went to Mercy [the all girl catholic school across the street from Stonestown]. I'm starting to wonder' - and her eyes widened 'when will I get tired of this neighborhood?'
We laughed. It sounded like she was getting tired of this neighborhood.
'You'll decide,' I said.
The train glided up to the Stonestown platform. She got up to disappear back into the bitstream of nameless faces, each one entitled to dignity.
'Have a good day,' she said with a smile.
'You, too,' I replied.
'Thanks.'
So today I met another native of San Francisco. I love meeting native city dwellers because they know their home. They also fascinate me because they have an unfathomable ability to get tired of their city.

Have a friendly conversation with a random stranger every day. It's an apple a day for the city.

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 A man runs up to the 44 bus stop at Forest Hill. He is wearing a tidy black suit with a cornflower blue shirt. Everything else is gold -- gold tie, gold glasses, short-cropped gold hair, and reddish gold skin. He ran up to the stop huffing and puffing, not wanting to be late. We both smiled real neighborly.
 "Long day." He said to me. His breathing was slowing back down.
 "Yeah, I had one like that yesterday."
 "I was up at six," he replied, pointing at his watch, "and what is it now? Seven!"
 "Thirteen hours later, you're still on your feet. Yeah, wow."
 Turns out he's from Brooklyn. When he was a kid, his dad took him to the construction site of the World Trade Center back in the sixties, to make a home movie of it. The construction crew was still pouring the foundations. There were two enormous, gaping holes in the earth lined with concrete; ready for two skyscrapers to be nested in them.
 "They were like two gigantic kitchen sinks in the ground," he said. A couple of years ago, he went back to New York and saw the same rubble filled hole in Manhattan Island. This time the buildings were not being built; they were already destroyed.
 "It stunned me, seeing the same scene from my childhood... Thirty some years later and it felt like last year."
 "Yeah. Im astonished by how immediate yet distant memories can be. It's like folding time."