Day 98 - Stranger Story

Stranger Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 Margaret realized a long time ago that she liked strangers more than she liked the people she knew. Strangers smiled and asked how you were doing and how your day was or some other sort of pleasantry and then they took their answer and went away. They did not ask too many questions. They did not care enough to, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Strangers left you alone. Strangers knew you didn’t care about them and knew that you knew that they didn’t care about you. It was an openly tacit agreement between civilized people. Pretend to smile. Pretend that the weather was interesting. Pretend that a nod or a handshake or small talk and witless conversations were worthwhile. It was nice and polite and agreeable and noncontroversial. And then it was over. And you were free to live the rest of your day in whatever way you so chose.

Whereas when you actually knew someone, there was always some reason right around the corner to wish that you didn’t actually know someone. A friend or acquaintance or associate meant that polite pleasantness was suddenly dropped. These were the people that showed their true colors, their true nature. They felt like they had somehow earned the right to be disagreeable because of length of contact and that somehow it was everyone else that had to put up with their nonsense.

Strangers knew strangers did not want to hear about problems or bad days or personal problems. Knowing someone meant you had to listen, had to care, had to remember. Strangers did not ask for favors. Friends always felt they were in a position to impose. Knowing someone meant that when they were having a bad day, they could snap and punish you for it, and then still expect you to forgive and forget. Strangers never assumed another stranger would put up with foul moods and idiotic personality disorders. Knowing someone meant they somehow earned the right to make someone else do what they didn’t really want to do. Or then feel the freedom to make excuse after excuse and try to get out of reciprocating any token or courtesy. A stranger never asked a stranger to help them move or to give up their weekend or miss their favorite hobby or to chip in on a gift for some distant friend of a friend. A stranger knew their place and a stranger was honest about it. A friend knew their place and pretended to be innocent when they tried for something more.

Liking strangers didn’t mean that Margaret didn’t try to know people. She tried to meet new people everyday. She hoped that someday she might actually meet a broad enough scope of strangers that she would meet people that she actually wanted to know. She thought in a world of strangers there would have to be enough people that someone somewhere would retain the same level of polite and cordial interactions even when they became something more than a simple stranger.

Margaret believed in random acts of kindness and paying it forward and all sorts of other new age and self-help clichés that had been written about in fiction, film and advice columns. Margaret went out of her way to try to brighten the days of those around her without asking for anything in return. She had read somewhere about a theory that all interactions could be examined from the view of a tree and the fruit hanging from its limbs. No one wants to eat a lemon. No one wants to have to climb and work for the fruit. No one wants to have to chop into a tree to find out if it’s nice on the inside. People want simple. They don’t want bitter or anger or people that are hard to deal with. They want the tasty sweet fruit that is easy to reach. So she made her outside presentation to the world as simple and as sweet as possible. She presented an apple and looked for an apple in return.

Margaret liked to get in line at coffee shops and buy everyone’s drink. She liked to pick up random tabs at restaurants and bars. She paid for people’s parking meters and left change in the ‘leave a penny take a penny’ penny trays at stores. She found that little surprises brightened the days of people around her and in turn made her day seem a little sweeter. Margaret smiled a private smile when she did things like this. She never felt lonely or sad; she always had new people to meet and the hope that some of them might be worth her efforts and time.