by Roger Angell, New Yorker
Walking my dog last week, I came upon a man crying in the street. He was sitting on the raised stone ledge of a back-yard fence separating two small apartment houses, his back against the iron bars, with one hand up to his face. The dog gave him a glance and we moved on by, but when I stopped after a decent distance and looked back he’d bent forward in his misery and I could hear sobs. A thin, tall man, perhaps in his late forties, his pale face now glistening with tears. Black jeans, gray shirt, some sort of jacket. My first thought was to go back and ask if there was anything I could do. My dog is a young fox terrier, and I thought that his charm might perk up the poor guy for a moment. I held back, though, immobilized by New York’s code of privacy and because I was embarrassed. He hadn’t noticed us, and the soft sounds of his grief now seemed to be the main event on the block we were on. What had happened? What rotten news had come his way? His mother had died. His girlfriend—they’d have been together for three years, come January—had gone away to São Paulo for good, leaving a note on the kitchen table and a longer message on his e-mail. His cat Max unaccountably fell down the airshaft. His lover, who runs an art-moving business, had been hit by a bicycle on Greenwich Avenue and required neurosurgery. His job—he was a furniture restorer; an anesthesiologist; an associate curator; a cloud-computer analyst and designer; a private-school gym teacher—had been terminated by budget considerations. His father, the retired oboist, urgently needed a live-in companion with experience in dementia. I didn’t know or need to know. The dog and I resumed our tour, and I was surprised by unexpectedly remembering what crying is like.
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