Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
Friends, get comfortable. I have a story to tell you. Something happened that overwhelmed me with gratitude and I cannot keep a reminder this potent to myself. I spent Sunday afternoon meeting up with a friend and her dog at a local brewery. I decided to walk the three miles home because it was a gorgeous day and I love a long walk. It’s my favorite form of exercise.
When I walk, my headphones are in and I’m in my own world. (My mace is in my hand, it was broad daylight, it’s fine.) Suddenly, a fully grown human man wearing wraparound sunglasses and shorts that went past his knees leaps into my field of vision with his hands up. "MAAM!" I take my headphones out. "Are you from here?" he says. I tell him I live here. He points at an elderly woman next to him and says, "She can't find her bus." And he runs away. He was instantly gone. I was now in charge, this was now my problem, and I want to stress to you that at no point in the resolution of this story did I need to be a local New Orleans resident in order to offer the requisite help. This woman was lost, confused, alone, and walking with a cane. To set the scene further, all three people in this story are white, I am 42, he was roughly my age, and the elderly woman was well over 80. To learn that she was 90 wouldn’t have surprised me.