Observations of a City Cyclist, Episode 1
A Honk, and a Stack of Cards
There exists quite a busy intersection in the northwest corner of Cambridge’s bow-shaped expanse.
This spot, where Rindge Avenue comes to an end at the four-lane Fresh Pond Parkway—directly across from the Alewife MBTA station—is rarely free of cars. The bloodflow of humans in their machines coming from the western suburbs along Route 2 starts to pool up at that intersection, meeting urban congestion for the first time.
It’s an October morning and I am riding my city bicycle—the one I use when traversing Cambridge, Somerville, Boston—and I’m about to cross Rindge Ave at the Parkway. I stay alert as I approach, since there is a good chance that many of the cars will turn right at the red light, thinking they’ll break that particular rule “just this once.”
On the other side of the crossing is the foot of a bridge that arches up and over railroad tracks first constructed in the 1840s for trains running their goods and people past the adjacent North Cambridge neighborhood.
The light changes, and as I reach the start of the pedestrian path at the base of the bridge, I shift into a lower gear and look to my right, always curious about the mini-dramas that unfold at this intersection. In the three-foot-wide median of the Parkway, I notice a man with a cart and a dog, standing with a sign in his hands. His skin is weathered and his clothes are worn, but he has a smile on his face.
The light has just turned green for Parkway traffic, but a car—after pulling up ten feet or so—slows, then comes to a stop for a moment so the driver can hand the man some cash through an open window. As the man with the sign leans over to take the money and thank the woman behind the wheel, the driver of the car behind the generous one beeps in anger (this was not a “gentle nudge beep”, but clearly a “get the @&#! out of my way beep”).
But I’m on the move, so I don’t catch what happens next. As I continue on over the bridge, the three of them are left suspended in my mind, locked into those same positions in both time and space.
It’s a few minutes later. The ride I’m on this morning is a simple one: I’m on my way from Arlington to visit my mother in Cambridge. I’m only about a quarter of a mile past the three players of that frozen game of chicken back at Rindge Ave.
It’s now time for me to cross Fresh Pond Parkway to get to the pedestrian path that runs alongside Fresh Pond itself. As I’m waiting for the walk signal, I notice three or four people on the other side of the road, also standing by as the seconds tick away. One of them is a man with a bicycle helmet in his hand. He is not on his bicycle, but is standing next to it and is holding a stack of small cards in his other hand.
Still waiting for the signal, I now see a woman roll up on her bike on the other side, come to a stop, and wait with the others for the light to change.
The man with the cards turns and begins to talk to the woman. Before the light changes, he hands her one of the cards he was holding, which she seems happy to take.
The light changes.
I cross over to the other side and and just as I reach the man, he looks away and doesn’t engage with me; he doesn’t offer me a card.
There are six people involved in this story: the man asking for money in the median, the generous driver, the impatient driver, the man with the cards, the woman with one of the man’s cards in her hand, and me.
Each of the five people I observed that morning has a unique life story, unknowable in its fullness to anyone but them. I witnessed only a few fleeting seconds of their movements, just a small segment of the much longer path that their unfolding lives have followed.
So, naturally, I have questions.
What events from the man’s infancy, childhood, teen years, or adulthood put him in a position of standing in the median and asking drivers for money on their way to work? How does he feel about his situation? Does he have family that lives nearby? What emotional, psychological, or physical issues might he have? Did he have a place to sleep that night? How was the rest of his day?
Who was this woman who was willing to take a moment to brighten the median man’s day just a bit? Had she done this before? Where did her empathy come from—had she known someone else in a similar situation? Was she on her way to work? If so, what kind of work does she do? How did the rest of her day go?
Why was the driver of the other car, the one witnessing generosity unfold in front him, agitated enough to honk his horn? Was he, on principle, against handouts? Was he late for work? Was he frustrated by something else going on in his life, putting him in no mood for this kind of nonsense? Didn’t he reach the next red light at pretty much the same time he would have anyway? How did the rest of his day go?
Who was the man standing next to his bicycle with the cards in his hand? What was written on the cards? Was he handing them out for his own business? For some political movement? How long did he plan on standing there? Did I not look to him like someone who would be interested in his cause?
And who was the woman accepting the card from him? Did she take it out of pity—or out of genuine interest? Did she ever look at the card again—or did she just toss it in the trash later that day? If she had kept it, could it have somehow changed the trajectory of her day? Of her life? Where was she going on her bike?
After giving some thought to my two observations that morning, I toyed with the idea of writing a story where I would concoct my own fictional answers to all of these questions; where the lives of these six people would coincide later that day in a way that would reveal something about their lives and about human nature. But for now, I’ll have to rest in the mysteries that each of them left me, contemplating the picture that was briefly painted by this quarter-mile of life unfolding on an October morning in Cambridge…
POSTSCRIPT:
To be honest, I couldn’t discern the gender of either of the drivers at the traffic light. I chose to portray the generous one as a woman and the impatient one as a man (I first tried they/their, but the awkward sentences got in the way of telling the story clearly and concisely).
It’s interesting to think how readers may have reacted differently if I’d reversed their genders—or if I’d described them both as women, or both as men. I wonder if my questions would have remained the same.
I also didn’t know their age or ethnicity. Would it have been read differently if a young black man had been the generous one and a middle-aged white woman the honker. What about an older Asian man stopping to help, and a young Middle Eastern woman beeping?
I probably shouldn’t have assigned the drivers any genders at all (or ages or ethnicities, which I didn’t). This would have freed readers of the burden of any conscious or unconscious bias creeping into their interpretations of these simple events. It also would have put the focus purely on “human behavior,” without the cultural implications that any more detailed description would unavoidably add to the mix.
Maybe next time…
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Photo by Anthony Beckwith
Hi! Thanks for sharing your observations. The question came up for me once you assigned the gender of the drivers -- I wondered how you knew.
i was comforted knowing it was a woman who made the offering and not surprised it was a man beeping...but after reading your p.s. I thought -- oh, it could have been an angry woman, like the one who ran (on foot) after my car last week when she put her directional on to take a left into a driveway, and then changed her mind, .almost hitting me as I proceeded at a stop sign -- or should I leave in the typo? as I proceeded at a stop sigh!