A Brief Respite from Rancor

Is there anything more felicitous in this fractious world than a polite encounter with a random stranger in public?

Spend too much time online, and it's easy to fall into a sort of paranoia that everyone is out to get you. Social media misbehavior has become so pervasive that it's hard to imagine running into a person whose politics you are unaware of, and who is unaware of yours, and who does not, at least in the moment, appear to care.

And it's not just online. We read of protests and riots and people yelling at each other in coffee shops and violence instigated by even the smallest of infractions. Open the door for the wrong person, and it could be curtains.

Yet I spent a perfectly lovely afternoon recently out in the wild amongst my fellow Americans, on a busy Christmas shopping day before a forecasted snowstorm when one might expect tempers to be frayed. The young couple I asked to move their lunch to another table so I could have two next to each other did so cheerfully, even though they were deep in conversation and their lunch turned out to consist of many, many pieces. They were soon back to eating and chatting, none the worse for wear, and if they went home and posted on X about some bossy white lady swooping in and claiming their table like she owned it, I did not see it.

At the supermarket, which was super-full of Northeasterners worried they might starve in a blizzard if they didn't have enough bread and eggs, I kindly consented to watch the cart of a lady in line who had forgotten something, and nobody called me out for it. When she came back, we chatted agreeably about the annoyance of having to remember to bring canvas bags to the store. I may have reminisced a little too fondly about plastic bags, and she seemed to be heading in the direction of clarifying that her annoyance at having to bring a bag should not be interpreted as a desire to destroy the planet, but it was time for me to pay for my purchases so we just nodded agreeably and parted.

The one interaction I'm not quite sure what to think about happened at a local bookstore. I was in line behind an older gentleman who was looking at the items on display for last-minute impulse buys and commented that he wanted to find something to read to his three-year-old grandson. I mentioned a couple of books I'd enjoyed with my son, but then he saw a cardboard version of The Night Before Christmas and thought that would be a nice tradition to start, as indeed it would.

We continued to chat about books, and then at some point, he decided he wanted to tell me a joke. It involved some old ladies trying to have a smoke in the rain at their senior facility and using condoms to keep the cigarettes dry, which seems impractical to me, but also ... did this qualify as a dirty joke? Was a random man telling a random woman an unsavory joke in a store line in 2025? The lady behind us who snapped that registers were open and we should get a move on had the sort of disapproving tone I'd expect, so maybe it was.

He had not yet finished the joke when we parted to pay, so when I was done with my purchase and he was not yet, I dutifully waited near the cash registers. He looked around excitedly for me, and then with relish finished the joke, which involved one of the old ladies trying to buy her cigarette covers at a pharmacy next to a zoo, and a misunderstanding between the brand of cigarette she wanted to cover and a creature living next door.

I laughed and told him that was disgusting. He laughed and pointed out there were no bad words. And then he headed out into the approaching storm, and I headed back to the cafe to try to figure out how to tell my husband about this congenial interaction I'd had with a stranger.

Now, with reflection, I'm wondering whether I should be disturbed by the casual telling of off-color jokes to ladies stuck in lines. Is this a sign of the handbasket we're rocketing to hell in? The way inappropriate topics have worked their way into general discourse? A sign of standard slippage and the death of chivalry?

Honestly, at the time, I just thought, "I must look like the kind of person who won't immediately call over the manager screaming about microagressions," and I felt pretty good about that.