L Train, 6 p.m.

I was on the L train crossing town from 8th Ave. to 3rd. It is March, the last month I will ever see the 10th St. apartment in which I grew up and my father died. I am living here now, have been for a few months, dealing with Ray’s artwork. Anyway, I was on the L train and I notice this pretty girl sitting down in the crowded car. She’s pretty, but she also has a sweetness to her, she seems too young for her looks. The world hasn’t gotten its hooks into her yet, and she is unspoiled. She feels quiet, and self-possessed, but a little wary too, as one must be on a New York subway.

I go about my business, which is just to stand there while the steel lozenge lurches east, taking in the multifarious stimulation of the impossibly various group. Then I sense movement to the left and there is that wonderful moment you sometimes get in New York where someone offers something generous and kind and the other person’s reflex is to refuse it: No, I’m okay, I’m not in need of help or succor. Please, you don’t need to … and then the acquiescence … the gorgeous melting where they think they might accept it, I am so tired and these bags are so heavy and maybe it’s okay … and before you know it, the woman with the shopping bags is dropping onto the bench, and the pretty girl is moving away, in my general direction, with no particular awareness of me, as far as I can tell. Who knows how she sees me, if she sees me at all? An older man, an unshaven man, a fat man, a tall man, a man with a funny hat. Perhaps I am something like her father, or the kind of presence her father warned her about. But she is savvy enough to know not to meet my eye, even if she were inclined to, even if the smallest speck of curiosity about another human being on the subway train arose in her. And she just stands there and seems engrossed by the advertisements that promise healthy, attractive skin in just 2 weeks, thanks to a revolutionary new citrus technique devised by a board-certified dermatologist in Astoria.

But I am aroused by her kindness. Not sexually aroused, but roused in the heart, as if my heart had been sleeping and an unlooked-for moment of human soulfulness had disturbed my sleep and forced me to look around the car with eyes scrubbed clean. “That was very nice of you,” I said to the girl. And just around the time I got finished saying the word “was,” she looked up into my eyes, and they twinkled, those eyes, the way eyes twinkle when a person is really smiling, and then the rest of her face followed, a smile shy and tentative in the mouth but bold in the irises. “Thank you,” she said.

Which is all it takes, really, to rediscover a small portion of faith in life, in people, in the notion that there might be something worth saving in us after all, something worthwhile. So pummeled are we by the technology and the politics and the noise and the media and the loss of something, we don’t remember quite what it was but it has traveled far from us, just far enough that, like Tantalus, we reach out for it always but it stays just beyond our reach. Some thing we used to love about life, some fun, some warmth — that surely went along with fear and pain too, but baby with the bathwater! we got full-service numbing. We numbed the pain, and we numbed the joy. I mean joy! Not some bargain-basement, third-rate passing moment of pleasure. But the real thing, the joy of falling in love — with people, with leaves and sunsets, with riffs and pastels, with the truly comic shenanigans of the mind. This we forget. Except we don’t completely forget, and when it seems to hover in the distance there’s something we recognize, something vaguely familiar, and we want it to come closer so we can examine it. And when she smiles, and her hazel eyes glitter, and she says thank you, we too feel ourselves touched by something we’d kept in a room with the door shut.

All this transpired in the time it takes the L to get from 8th Ave. to Union Square, and when the doors opened, the girl turned around and gave me an even more lovely smile: “Have a good evening,” she said, and walked out of my life. I felt joy in that moment, and the crazy thing is you can get to the point, if you’re lucky, where encounters like these don’t end when the girl walks off the train. Because it was not the girl at all, but the possibility of the girl, the possibility of communion, of a shared smile between strangers. Something not corrupt or cynical, something not corporate! Something that required no technology or additional information. Just a smile, unbound to history, to place or time. And in the smile is born hope.