Consequential Strangers

If anyone out there knows Susan Dominus, please introduce us.   Her stories invariably revolve around key concepts covered in Consequential Strangers.   My neighbor Joan, on whom I can always rely to clip stories about consequential strangers, had saved Dominus’s piece,  Happy Times at the Dog Run, Now Coming to an End (New York Times, November 7, 2009).   It centered on Dick Sebastian, a surgeon-turned-dog-portraitist who, with his wife Susie, had become part of a community of dog owners’ in Washington Square Park.  (It sounded a lot like “the path,” where I walk my dog in Northampton, Massachusetts.)

Dominus points out that we create “ad hoc communities based on proximity and built up around mutual affection.”   If you want an example, she notes, “walk into any watering hold at 7:30 pm.”   The people we meet there aren’t “close” relations; they’re consequential strangers.  So we may not be aware of how much we depend on their presence.  But then one day you go into your bank, and your favorite teller has been transfered.    A coffee shop closes.   Or, in the story Dominus reports,   Dick Sebastian–a man from the dog run who once surprised you with a sketch of your dog–announces that he’s planning to move.   Dominus quotes Jessica Pell, one of the women who knew Sebastian:

Ms. Pell, who is single and works for herself, said that right now, Mr. Sebastian represents stability to her. She’s there every day; he’s there every day, often with Susie, always with Kitty, a border terrier, attending to the story line of Ms. Pell’s life, picking up on the details that other good friends, absorbed in their own narratives, often miss.  “Susie and Dick never forget,” she said. “They’ll ask you the next day, ‘Are you feeling better?’ Or, ‘How did the meeting go?’ ”

Come to think of it, none of my close friends clip articles about CS for me the way Joan does.