Pattern

This afternoon I was coming back from the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. Near my apartment building I saw two people helping an old lady who fell down in the street. She was lying in the gutter and murmuring. I walked over and asked if I could help and they said yes.

There wasn’t much we could do. “911 told us not to move her,” said one of the people. But the sun was very bright. So we tried to make a shelter with our bodies. We took turns standing over her to give her shade and held her hands and talked to her.

A third person brought a pillow out of his house. We put the pillow under her head. She had orange hair and was in a housecoat.

We asked her name and she told us. We asked if she was in pain. She said her shoulder hurt.

We said that she should not be embarassed and that everyone falls down.

The man who made the 911 phone call was Black. He had stopped his car to help. The man with the pillow might have been Latino. He saw her fall. “She fell,” is how he explained it. I think the woman who was there was from Eastern Europe or the Ukraine. I am white, actually pink but whatever. I live in Ditmas. All we were missing was a Bangladeshi woman and an ultra-orthodox Jew and we would have had everybody.

We said that we would stay with her until more people came with an ambulance.

We said that we were glad to be there and glad to help her.

We live very close to a fire station. We said, do you hear the sirens? This will be over soon.

A man came by and offered to get us water. We asked if she wanted water. She said no. We asked where she lived. Five or six other people came over but there was nothing much to do so they would leave after a moment so as not to add complexity. They would have stayed if we’d asked.

Again this was just a few minutes.

The old lady suddenly said she was going to get her daughter who went to PS 139.

“Oh, Alexine Fenty,” I said. That is the elementary school where my kids will go next year. But if her daughter went to Alexine Fenty that was in the 1960s.

A fire engine came. Then an ambulance came. Four or five men.

They talked to her and took her away from us. They put her on a gurney and asked her the year.

She said the year was “19.”

When it was over we just nodded at each other and walked away. “Good job?” we asked. “I guess we did what we could?”

I realized I recognized the woman. I’ve seen her once or twice. She is the woman in the crumbling house who yells at everyone and calls the cops on everyone. My wife told me once that people try not to be angry with her because her daughter passed away.

This is probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve been in this circumstance since I moved to NYC. Sometimes someone is passed out in bushes. Sometimes someone wants to talk to you and pretend to be your friend because a man is chasing them. In different neighborhoods. There are a lot of people here.

These things are surprising but not unexpected. You remember them but they blur together too. The ambulance comes and you go home and have a drink and maybe blog about it. It helps to write it down.

Sometimes I’ve walked past similar situations but there have been enough people helping. And yet there are all the other people you do walk by who are sleeping on the sidewalk.

I’m writing it down because it is all very normal and I don’t see people writing it down a lot. Often people don’t help other people, but other times people do help other people. It’s not actually surprising when it happens. You just hold the old lady’s head and shield her from the sun. Then the ambulance comes and everyone goes on their ways, feeling weird, proud, and sad.