Mysterious Strangers
Somethings, everythings.
There is a young man in a red football jersey holding a small poster at the end of a crosswalk on a busy Suburban street. You guess that he’s no more than sixteen, mostly because his shorts are halfway up his thighs, and no I’m not a pervert. Plus he has a haircut that you’ve only ever seen on the teenagers dancing on TikTok which you resentfully deleted in 2021.
You sip your caffeine, perplexed as to what he could possibly doing on that busy corner before 9AM on a Sunday morning until a man in a shiny Lexus pulls over and hands him twenty bucks. You realize, mystified, that he’s raising money for his football team, though you’re not sure why because he lives in a rich Connecticut suburb and goes to public school. Is this how booster clubs work now? Unemployed, underage students holding signs long after their football season has ended, hoping for the middle-aged man whose shorts are decidedly below his knees drives by and dips into nostalgia for a time when that jersey fit around his taut abdomen and glistened under the friday night lights. It is on the bright edge of this memory that he tucks into his worn wallet for the bill. The young man runs across the street without looking both ways, so elated by the possibility of success after hundreds of cars racing by in rejection, that he nearly trips over the concrete. He regains his balance, twenty bucks in hand, celebrating with the zeal of someone whose voice has yet to drop, little whiskers of fuzz barely visible on his top lip.
It is only later, when he races across the street, excitement still clouding his judgement, that he might be more than what you’d pegged him as, with every sip another absorbing glance. Red spots sprinkle his cheeks in a flutter of both the innocence of youth and the shame of pubertal change. He walks with his eyes downcast, the curls atop his head shading his eyelids. His sign—“Greenwich Cardinals” in bold white letters—somehow dimmer on this side of the street, swinging dejected at his side.
Your initial judgements bitter on your tongue, the mystery of this stranger unfolding like the ice melting in your once-fresh Starbucks cup. Something’s changed. When you finish your coffee, close your laptop, and zip your Patagonia, you ask the young man if they take spare change for that’s all you have. You’re not a sports fan nor care about youth football probably because of the football player that broke your eighth grade heart, but you give this young man the benefit of the doubt with all of twenty-three cents that you dig out of your own worn wallet.
The Greenwich High School Football Team boosted, you pray, because you give all you could in that moment, including your wish for their continued success and teamwork!
I’m a cynical twenty-four year old; that much I know. The “You” above was my way to evoke sympathy in you—my paid subscribers—ironic, I know, in order to discharge my strange observances as something universal when deep down I know my judgements are singular, my responsibility alone.
