I met her when I was walking around the produce section holding a watermelon like it was my pregnant belly; I heard a pleasant voice behind me say, “Don’t get too attached to that or you won’t eat it.” “The watermelon baby’s name is Beth,” I said, then turned around to find a woman with reddish curly hair wearing a store name tag that also said “Beth,” and we laughed because what are the odds. She told me about the time the market got a shipment of watermelons that proceeded to explode in customers’ carts, in the giant in-store watermelon bin, on the checkout conveyor belts.
I wanted an exploding watermelon. “Well, they didn’t really explode,” Beth said, rather they abruptly cracked open and got juice everywhere. I said exploding watermelons makes a better story than abruptly cracking watermelons, so keep telling it like that.
Either way, it was apparently a huge sticky mess. I shop late at night and she works the late shift, so I often see her when I’m there. We talk while she scans the bread, the tiny orange tomatoes, the store-brand ice cream.
Advertisement She has a day job — she said she’s always worked two jobs — as a researcher at a biotech lab. She said that one day a coworker at the lab passed out after drinking coffee from the break room. Then another.
It turned out someone had put a toxin, uncommon outside the lab but readily available within, in the coffee. “But why?” I asked. She said the stakes there are high: grants are won and lost; careers start and end; people come and go.
People snap. They never found out who did it, as far as she knows. Beth is one of those people I have an immediate connection with but never really know and often never see again.
I marvel with joy at the statistically impossible sets of circumstances and timing that bring strangers together for a moment in the grocery store, in the airport, in the city, in the middle of nowhere. An Uber driver, whose name I’ve long forgotten (honestly I didn’t memorize it in the first place), is another. Like Beth, he had another job, as a phlebotomist, a damn good phlebotomist he said.
We were going through the Ted Williams Tunnel, en route from Logan Airport to Newton, when we really got talking. One day, he said, a woman he was driving was particularly awful to him — aggressively critical, threatening bad reviews, subtly racist. By the time they reached her destination, it had become, intentionally on her part, very unpleasant for him.
Advertisement Later that same day, he said, he was working at the hospital and a nurse came to get him. They had a patient, she said, who no one could get a line into and she needed an IV — badly. He was their last hope.
Of course, he said, but when he walked into the patient’s room ...
guess who. The patient refused to let him help her. “It’s me, or no IV and a lot of pain,” he said.
She acquiesced. “What did you do?” I asked. I imagined subtle revenge a person would be tempted to make in those circumstances.
“I was professional. I got the needle in on the first try,” he said. Damn good phlebotomist is right.
There are so many others. The kid at the Waltham pet store who offered to let me hold the ferrets even though employees weren’t supposed to let customers pet them unless that customer might actually want to buy one. Did I know, he asked on a later dog food trip, that there used to be a dance hall over the water, near the Waltham Watch Factory? He was working on a high school paper about the history of the Charles River and loved that fact.
Advertisement Then there is the checker who had a whole conversation with my son about how sometimes mint is “too sharp,” which I don’t get. The phone customer service representative with the beautiful voice, who sang to herself while her computer caught up. All the other parents standing in the eternal merch line at concerts; we’re best friends.
Recently my husband and I were driving to get coffee when a man walking two beautiful pit bull-mix dogs suddenly pulled them off the sidewalk into the street about a quarter block ahead. The dogs were lunging, barking, wagging mach 10, and finally I saw the object of their interest: a large fluffy orange cat sitting on the sidewalk. The man finally got his dogs to the other side of the street, glancing at us apologetically, when the cat got up and ran across the street straight at the dogs.
By this time we were nearby, waiting to safely proceed. The cat got just out of reach of the dogs, leaned forward to further taunt or maybe investigate, then strolled down the sidewalk in front of them. The man looked at us, we looked at him, mouths agape.
Then we all burst into laughter, the two of us in the car and this complete stranger on the sidewalk all enjoying a moment of absolute absurdity together. Which is, maybe, what these moments are: Sharing the strangeness of it all, this life, the world, this one place and time, with no agenda other than to hear and be heard, to be human, together. Heather Hopp-Bruce is director of visual strategy for Globe Opinion.
She can be reached at [email protected] .
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