Lost

He was sitting on a bench as I got off the train at the UW light rail station, three long escalator rides beneath the surface.  He looked a bit older than the mobs of UW students passing around him, maybe 30, and a bit scruffier, but not terribly so.  He had a beard.  I hardly glanced at him, until I heard him crying.

A security guard was bent over him, speaking sternly.  The guy with the beard was sobbing, but he wasn't hysterical.  Not combative.  Not argumentative.  He just looked and sounded like a guy who had worked through all his options and had no idea what to do now.

I had a bit of a line to work through before boarding the escalator, and I kept my eye on the bearded man and the security guard.  Was he traveling without a fare?  Had he simply been sitting too long in one place?  I have no idea.  Strangely, the guard insisted that he enter the train from which I'd just unloaded.  He was entering the door, still crying, as the escalator carried me up and out of sight.

For many of us -- certainly for nearly all of the students hurrying around the bearded man -- life progresses easily.  We may think we have tough decisions to make, but we make the really significant decisions almost automatically.  Decisions like studying hard for grades, applying to college, finding a job.  Keeping our clothes clean and our bodies washed.  Looking people in the eye with at least some degree of confidence, real or feigned, when we speak to them.

We absorb these lessons from our parents and our peers.  But not everyone does -- not, at least, at the time when they would do the most good.  And if you miss one of those steps, you find yourself shunted off the main line track.

"There are no second acts in American lives."   F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, I think.  America gives more second chances -- and third and fourth chances -- than just about any other developed nation.  But the "second act" is harder to perform than a "first act" would have been.  And the third and fourth acts often become almost impossible.  Especially when all of your enthusiasm and self-confidence have been drained by the consequences of not successfully performing that "first act."

I know nothing about the bearded guy's back story, although I tend to make up stories for people in my head.  But I'd say he was a gentleman who had no further physical or emotional resources available, regardless of what "act" of his life he was contemplating.  I suspect we are surrounded by people like him.  Maybe they still have enough pride not to cry.  In public.  But they want to.

After I reached the surface, adjacent to Husky Stadium where all the lucky kids cheer their school's football team on autumn Saturdays, something occurred to me.  Too late.  How easy it would have been to break away from the line at the escalator for just a second, walk onto the train, hand the guy a $20 bill, smile, and say good luck.  Maybe that one act of kindness -- more than the money itself -- would have kick-started his ability to cope again.  But I didn't.

I try to make up for having done nothing by writing about it.  But, of course, things don't work that way.