Consequential strangers matter. We don’t always pay attention to the cumulative effects of a warm hello, help with a package, a bit of information. But when someone you once took for granted is no longer there–you realize how those, brief, subtle, everyday interactions add up. Manhattan psychologist Mindy Greenstein wrote about such a realization in her must-read piece, My Building’s Protocol, Altered in a Flash.
In Greenstein’s social convoy (as in all of ours), are people who ride along with her as she makes her way down the road of life–individuals and clusters of people from a particular realm, such as the office or, in this case, the apartment building where Mindy and her family live. She writes about “Little Louie,” her 58-year-old a doorman who drove a red motorcycle to work. When he is critically injured in an accident, Greenstein and other residents and staff visit him in the hospital where he lay unconscious. There she runs into his daughter. Greenstein shows her the cards her sons made for Louie–artifacts of caring. The doorman is an important part of their social convoy, too. When a fellow first grader teased one of her sons, calling his artwork “scribble scrabble,” Louie taught him how to draw. The daughter is not surprised; her father was “great at drawing…great at everything.” Greenstein writes:
It feels intrusive getting this glimpse into Louie’s personal life, when I’m so used to it being the other way around. Louie always knew who came and went. He even knew when I returned from chemotherapy every other Tuesday three years ago, offering his usual smile and a kind word. A natural pessimist, I was still persuaded when he would say, “It’ll be fine, you’ll see.” I want so much to be able to say the same thing to him now.
I’m beginning to realize how little I know about him. I think he’s in his late 50s, that he hails from Puerto Rico and now lives in the Bronx, that he has a girlfriend whom he met when she worked in our building as a nanny. I know that he loves his daughters and grandchildren, and they love him. All the children love him, especially the two little girls who live on the first floor and like to call him the Grouch while he teases them and makes them giggle.
Such is the paradox of consequential strangers. On her deathbed, Greenstein won’t be saying, “I wish I had spent more time with my doormen.” Louis is replaceable. But he is also a one-of-a-kind, a person who changes her day in small, wonderful ways. And he is a vital part of her everyday comings-and-goings. This paradox is even more dramatic where there is an “assymetry,” as Greenstein calls it–a relationship of unequals. Theoretically, we save our tears for close relations, but when Greenstein leaves the hospital, learning that her doorman’s prognosis is grim, she is “red-eyed.” When she walks down the block, knowing that his red motorcycle won’t be there. She misses it; she misses him–and yet hardly knew the man.
Little Louie is the employee; it is his job to be friendly and courteous–for Greenstein, it was optional, and yet she valued the relationship. She understood that he mattered. After sharing the depressing news with three other employees of the building that Louie probably won’t survive, she challenges a long-standing social practice in her building:
Suddenly, I turn back around and say what I’ve wanted to say for 15 years. “Would it be all right if you called me by my first name? I know it’s not policy.”
“I would like it, actually,” Big Louie says. “We’re all family here.”
George and Elliot say they’ll do it, too, if that’s what I want.
“Yes, please. Call me Mindy.”
In a few words, Greenstein blurs the social boundaries and lets her consequential strangers know that they matter. It is a fitting tribute to Little Louie and and expresses an important social and spiritual principal: Relationships needn’t be painted as as “close” or “not-close,” but rather as meaningful.
