Lost and Found

The 5:47 M60 arrives on time. I swipe my MetroCard, slip it back into my wallet, and slip my wallet back into my bag, or so I think. I sit staring at the line of empty cyrulean seats. I'm thinking that here on public transportation is one of the few places rich and poor, educated and not, white collar and blue, healthy and sick, groomed and dissheveled, come together.

A man gets on at the next stop and bends to pick up something from the aisle. I wonder if there is a leaflet or litter. He comes up with a blue wallet in his hand, my wallet, and offers it to the gray haired woman in the single seat in front. She shakes her head.

"It's mine! Oh, thank you!" I say.

How can I thank him? How can I let him know that he has prevented me from starting my day with no money for my paper, no ticket for my train to work, no driver's license, no credit cards. Not to mention a photo of my daughters forced to pose in the golden-pink light of late afternoon in the fall of 2001. The man takes a seat in the back of the bus. I turn to see what he looks like. I want to see his face. He wears a black Northface parka and braids pulled back into a knot under a knit cap.

Off at Park Avenue and 125th. I buy my paper at the 24 hour kiosk and outside a man gently accosts me. "I'm hungry. Will you buy me some food." It is a request. Not a question.

"What do you want?"

"Anything. I"ll eat anything."

We go into the Cuban deli. I suggest the almond porridge. He says he can't have milk. I buy him two hard boiled eggs for a dollar. He sits at a table inside and eats them out of a paper cup with a plastic fork. Up on the platform, waiting for the 6:13 to Southeast, watching the sky lighten from midnight blue to dark blue-gray, I am sorry I didn't buy him orange juice, too. I would have wanted orange juice with my eggs.