To save money, I usually bring my lunch to work. Sometimes, I get lazy and just can't be bothered to slap together two slices of bread with whatever meat product I have in the refrigerator at the time.
Yesterday was one of those days, so I ventured out into the Financial District to my favorite burrito place. For $6, they hand over an overstuffed burrito with rice, beans, chicken, and pico de gallo. Nothing compares to that first bite after painstakingly unwrapping it from its multi-layered tin foil. Sure, all subsequent bites taste just as delicious, but that first one, even after having quite a few of their burritos over the years, is incomparable, like the overture to a best-loved symphony--simply the beginning of something you know will be wonderful.
After my burrito was made and I pulled out my credit card, the cashier told me that their machine went down earlier, and they could only accept cash in the meantime. Which, of course, I did not have. The cashier, a woman with a sweet smile even in the chaos of the lunch rush, pointed to an ATM in the dining room, the kind that levies a charge just for looking at it. I told her that I'd run to an actual ATM down the street and be right back.
"Just pay later," she said.
"Yea, I'll be right back. My bank is just around the corner."
"No, mijo, the burrito will get cold!" She had meant for me to take it and just come back in the afternoon.
"Are you sure?" I asked, almost apologetic. With a smile, she gave me my burrito in a brown paper bag and waved me off.
Though I was hungry when I walked in, starving after the restaurant's aromas wafted over me, I didn't want to leave this debt unpaid, leave the woman, likely an owner or stakeholder in the store, wondering for long if she had misjudged me.
"Ay, mijo!" she said when I walked back in five minutes later with an uneaten burrito and a crisp twenty. Still, I felt much better.
You'd think that this would be the end of this post, that I would be grateful for her faith in me, a virtual stranger, and that I walked away believing that people still trusted one another. And while those things might be true, the story itself didn't exactly end there.
Later that afternoon, Sam and I took Grr to the park (the same one just a week ago he loved, but now inexplicably finds foreign and terrifying). As we walked back to our car, a woman in a beat-up sedan going in the opposite direction stopped in the middle of the road, rolled her window down a sliver, and beckoned for us. Sam ignored her like a good, hardened urbanite, but I handed him Grr's leash and approached the car.
She was supposed to meet her friend on Diamond, but she forgot the cross street and left her phone at home; could she use mine?
In the split second I had to respond, I surveyed this scene as best I could: a disheveled woman in a still-running car; a sullen and aloof man slouched in the passenger seat; a car that had seen better days with a window that she apparently could not (or just would not) open more than she already had, which conveniently was just the right amount of room for me to slide my phone through.
"Sorry, I don't have mine with me." God, I was a horrible liar, worse since I was fairly certain she could see a phone-shaped bulge in my pocket.
"What about your friend? Does he have his?"
Who, Sam? The one who is pretending that you and I aren't even having this conversation right now? "Sorry, I don't think he can help either." Not exactly a lie.
"Alright then, nevermind," she said as she sped off to her still-unknown intersection.
When I got back on the sidewalk, Sam handed me the leash. "So what did Crazy want?"
I told him.
"Oh yea, as if she doesn't already have a glove compartment full of other people's phones!" he said.
Maybe, but what if not? I couldn't help but think back to my lunch, to the woman's face as she handed me my burrito and encouraged me to eat it first while it was still warm, full of faith that I would return with payment.
"But a $6 burrito and a $100 phone are not the same," Sam retorted.
True, but maybe she really just needed to make a quick call, fell victim to Murphy's Law when she thought that she probably wouldn't need her phone this afternoon. I guess I'll never know now, but what I am still sure of was that I had been presented with an opportunity to help this woman, lost on Diamond Street, but I failed to give her the chance to prove my doubts about her wrong. Even worse, just five hours prior, the tables were turned, and I had been shown exactly how to give her that chance.
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