It was a frigid Saturday morning. A woman had dashed out to pick up medicine for her sick daughter. She was coatless; it was just a quick errand. As she pulled up to the suburban CVS, the woman noticed a large man in an electric wheelchair some distance from the drugstore entrance. An elderly couple hovered beside him. The husband stood shakily beside a trolley filled with Safeway bags. The wife pecked inexpertly at a cell phone.
The man in the wheelchair had tears running down his cheeks.
“You look like you need help.” The words fell from the woman’s mouth. She saw that the faces of the three were pinched — they’d been outside a while — as the wind sheared away the last of the warmth she’d brought from her car.
“Three hours for a taxi!” the old woman said. She gestured to the wheelchair. “He can’t move.”
It turned out that he was en route to the pharmacy when the battery on his wheelchair died, automatically locking the brakes. He’d already been stuck for some time — chilled, humiliated, and afraid — when the elderly couple had stopped. They had tried to help, but now they really needed to get indoors.
“I’ll stay with him,” said the newcomer. She didn’t have a coat, her daughter was sick, the taxi would take three hours — what else could she do?
Gratefully, after hugging the stranded stranger, the couple tottered off.
“Cup of coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“How about hot chocolate?”
“OK.” The two exchanged bleak smiles. A moment later, she returned.
“Thanks. I’ve never had Starbucks before.”
He sipped the hot drink, while she called around. Eventually she got through on a non-emergency line. Rescue would come, but not for a while.
So they waited. And whether it was the cold that made comrades of them, or the length of the silence to fill, what followed was one of those intense, rare, shimmering episodes of true human connection.
At first they exchanged banalities. The woman mentioned her sick daughter, the delicacy of raising a teenage girl.
“I had a daughter,” the man said. He pulled up the hem of his trouser leg, revealing a metal prosthesis. The accident that had taken his limbs had also taken his 9-year-old.
The woman told him about her two expensive therapists: The one that couldn’t help save her marriage, another in whom she confided her dread of what divorce would do to her children.
He told of his two therapists, government-provided: one wanted to drug him out of depression, the other wanted to talk him out of it.
Buffeted by cold winds, these unlikely companions talked about pain and hardship and love, about the unexpected turns that life takes. They cried.
She said: “I’m really sorry about your daughter and I’m really worried about mine.”
He said: “You don’t even know me, and look what you’ve done for me. Your children will be fine.”
Then the firetruck arrived. It was over. And they never even learned each other’s full name.
