Innocence found

When my older daughter was a little girl, the sight of homeless people on New York City streets reduced her to tears. She couldn’t understand why her parents wouldn’t drop money into all their outstretched hands, why we weren’t moved to rescue each and every one of them!

Street musicians, on the other hand, represented a form of begging she simply couldn’t tolerate, a target for her innocent outrage. “They can work. They should get jobs!” she would exclaim, not realizing that this form of street hustling was actually a kind-of job for them.

I love live music, but even the street variety has to measure up to a certain standard before I’ll take notice. Still, begging or no, I rarely ever found myself moved to drop money into a busker’s open case.

Well, this morning I did something I never did before. I bought a music CD from musicians in the subway! This group, The Ebony Hillbillies, performed regularly during the holiday season near the Times Square Shuttle entrance in Grand Central. Music has dropped off a bit since the height of the holiday-tourist season, and my commuting schedule is very erratic, so I wondered if and when I’d ever see them again. To my delight, they were there in their spot this morning.

This group is terrific! They’re a quartet of older black dudes who look like they’ve dropped into a foreign realm from a very faraway time and place. They’re not club performers and you won’t find them on Amazon.com, although amazingly, they do have a blog site! They sit there and play their hearts out into fiddle and banjo, washboard and bass. Their primitive vocals restore a level of innocence I thought was lost. This time around, I’m buying.

If you see something, say something

Several years ago, when my daughter was in junior high school, I confronted a couple of boys fighting on the street in our small, upscale, suburban town. A circle of kids surrounded the two as one pushed the other, goading him to action. Both were big for their age, nearly six feet tall, bulky and flabby and not yet comfortable with the size they’d expanded to. They were still, truly, boys.

I walked up to the one doing the pushing, stamped my foot, and shouted as sternly as I could, “Stop it!” They were startled, gave a “who me?” look, and pretended there was nothing really going on. My daughter, in the group of onlookers, was mortified.

That incident didn’t scare me. I never felt at risk. I was simply a mother, doing my motherly thing. And that was, after all, Chappaqua.

This evening, as I followed the heavy crowd of rush-hour commuters to a waiting subway shuttle, a young man in front of me and walking faster than the rest of us, dropped something. It sounded like a phone, so I bent down to pick it up for him. It wasn’t a phone. It was a knife. And just as I recognized it as such, he turned back, swooped down, and picked it up himself.

I was in Times Square, where there are, thankfully, many people, including many police officers. I walked up to the nearest pair of transit cops and told them what I’d seen. One of them went off to confront the young man, who by this time was on the next platform.

Then I got scared.

This man had a similar, young-for-his-size air; big, burly, his pants in danger of losing the struggle with gravity. And he stared right at me from across the tracks as I pointed him out to the officers. There is only one shuttle at a time between Times Square and Grand Central, and as I boarded, I started having visions of him waiting for me at the other end of the line... with his knife.

This incident worked out okay for me, a false alarm. I’m on a train, on my way home to my safe suburban haven. For the most part, I’m not fearful in New York, although that hasn’t always been so. But this incident hit me in a vulnerable spot. It reminded me that no matter how protected I feel in my own skin and environment, I can’t account for the unwholesome impulses of others.

Not to sound paranoid, but no matter how smoothly things seem to be going, there really can be dangers lurking in the shadows.