The Kindness of Strangers

The announcement came over the PA system at Logan Airport on the last day of July in 1979 as the planeload of people waited at the gate, where many of us sat on the floor because there weren't enough seats in the waiting area. Our departure would be many hours late; the flight eventually took off at 3 am.

This was back when people chatted with strangers on planes and waiting areas. The college students sitting on the floor started talking in small groups, and I ended up chatting with a Harvard astronomy grad student.

I would spend the next academic year at the University of Cambridge, but first I planned to travel through Europe for two months on a Eurail Pass. My luggage was a second-hand ill-fitting backpack, plus two large suitcases that I hoped to leave at my Cambridge College before I went to the Continent. The heavy suitcases didn't have wheels.

My brother-in-law was living in London and had agreed to let me stay at his flat my first night. When we landed, I tried to phone him but there was no answer. He must have given up waiting for me and left for the day.

Rather than waiting for him to return, I decided to take my chances and take a train to Cambridge. 

The astronomy grad student was on the same train, and we bonded over our love for the ice cream shop Steve's in Somerville, Massachusetts. I gave him an address to which his girlfriend could send my boyfriend the secret hot fudge recipe that some of the shop's angry employees gave out while they were on strike.

When I arrived in Cambridge, I started walking toward Churchill College, before I realized that the distance from the train station to the College was quite far.

Accosting a professionally-dressed gentleman who was walking down the street, I asked which direction was most likely to quickly lead to a phone booth. (This was of course well before cell phones.) When I accosted people on the streets of New York to ask for directions, they'd answer with neither of us breaking stride. I was surprised when the British gentleman stopped, pondered my question, then escorted me down the block until we found a phone booth. When he saw me struggling with the cumbersome suitcases, he picked them up and carried them himself. He waited outside the phone booth.

I rang up the College, and a bemused Porter said that yes, there was a closet where I could leave my suitcases if I arrived in the next few minutes; if I couldn't make it in time, I could do it tomorrow. Unfortunately, they didn't have a room for me to spend the night.

I explained the situation to the gentleman, thanked him, and bade him farewell, but he insisted on seeing it through until I was properly settled. 

That street was lined with B&Bs. The gentleman walked me from one B&B to the next, where I asked for a room and was turned down. Finally he had a chat with an owner who told him that this was the week of the Cambridge Festival, so there would be no available beds.

The gentleman decided that I should spend the night with his family. We found another phone booth, he talked to his wife, then he put me on the line so his wife could reassure me that he wasn't a Cambridge version of Jack the Ripper.

The man and I hopped on a bus and took it to their house, somewhere outside of Cambridge.

They had a lot of kids, ranging in age from early teens to late twenties. What I remember from the evening meal (in extreme jetlag that I was trying to conceal) is that someone passed me a plate heaped high with some sort of minced meat dish. It smelled wonderful, but there was much too much of it. I thought to myself, "I'll never finish this. But it would be rude to turn it down." So I ate and ate until the plate was clean. Years later, it dawned on me that perhaps the dish was intended for the entire table, and I was supposed to take a small amount and pass it on. If so, the family must have been horror-struck (not to mention hungry) by my voraciousness.

After the evening meal, we all sat in the living room and watched TV. The BBC was showing a dance performance in which the dancers were stark naked. This would have been impossible on network television in the US in 1979. I expected the children to titter the way American kids would, but everyone but me took it in their stride. Being a prudish American, my face flushed beet red in embarrassment, so I looked straight at the TV and hoped no one would notice.

It turned out that the kindly gentleman who had invited me home had recently moved his family to the Cambridge area to be near the hospital where he was undergoing transplants of multiple important organs. I felt awful for having allowed such a vulnerable patient to lug my heavy suitcases from B&B to B&B.

Since then, I've often thought of that family's generosity and kindness, and how trusting we were of each other.

Lacing up my shoe

When I was growing up, I learned on my mother's knee a song she had learned from her mother. It was sung to the same tune as Hatikvah, but with these words:

When I was single I had nothing to do.

I'd sit by the window, lacing up my shoe.

Now that I am married I have too much to do.

I can't sit by the window, lacing up my shoe.

One cries "Mama! Put me into bed!"

Another cries "Mama! Give me a piece of bread!"

I washed them, I fed them, I put them into bed.

Then I said to my husband, "I wish I were dead."

My mother's sister Mimi told me that her family learned the song in the late 1920s or early 1930s when it was played on WEVD, a Yiddish radio station in New York City that Grandma listened to every Saturday night.

My aunt, mother, and I thought the song was very funny. I'm always surprised that people are shocked and appalled when I tell them these lyrics. Perhaps one needs to have a New York sense of humor (from the last century). I give the lyrics here so they don't die when I do (though perhaps some would prefer that they did).

Does anyone else know these lyrics?