There are so many reasons to love New York City. Today, however, I had a chance meeting with a lady that made me add a new reason to my list. With all of the speculation outside of New York about New Yorkers and their distant and oftentimes cold dispositions, I met a lady today who proves them all wrong. I ran to an appointment downtown, and as I waited for the elevator, latest read in hand (A Thousand Splendid Suns), I noticed her kind of staring at me in my peripheral vision. My first response, as I think most would have it as well, was to think to myself, "Why do people have to stare? It's so rude." Now, mind you, if I'm the one doing the staring, then there must be a very good reason for it, but if I'm the object of inspection, then I have very different feelings about it. In any case, she broke the awkward elevator anticipatory silence with a question: "How is that one? I read The Kite Runner and loved it." I told her I wasn't too far in, but that I really enjoyed getting Hosseini's powerful writing from the perspective of a female protagonist after such a powerful account from his male protagonist in The Kite Runner. She went on to tell me about how much she loved The Bookseller of Kabul as well, perhaps even more. She also added an anecdote about her friend's Afghani husband, but for some reason that didn't mean quite as much to me.
The moral of the story: New Yorkers are not distant and cold. They've been more apt than perhaps any other group of people in any of my other globetrotting experiences to strike up a conversation--and those conversations are usually pretty interesting. Case in point!
