JUST A MINUTE

In late August, the clock tower chimed five o’clock at the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, and its traditional bells dueled with competing foghorns of cargo ships on the Bay.

It smelled like smoke, and my clothes reeked of a campfire simply from walking my dog around the block. The sky was blanketed with a hazy, beige film that had drifted in from the wildfires raging nearby. As of that day, hundreds of inhabitants had been forced to evacuate and, nearly 400,000 acres of ranches, farms, and villages had been destroyed. (n.b. This was just the start of the 2.5 million acres razed by wildfires about a month later, crowned with an eerie orange sky one day and a snowstorm of ashes the days thereafter.)

Stuck in a pandemic with blazing wildfires ripping up our surrounding landscapes, I felt more trapped than ever.

People mulling about the metropolis were now donning even thicker masks than before with added filters to battle the smoke and poor air quality. One double-masked woman looked like she was wearing a push-up bra over her mouth.

We were meeting a friend for dinner outside, and I had a half-hour to kill while my husband finished up a conference call in the car. It was rare to have time for myself, away from the musical chairs of apartment living, remote working, and online schooling.

Even rarer was the fact that we were headed out to dinner. After years of gasping to find time for family dinners at home, every night since mid-March has been Family Night.

We had made the exception to go out to celebrate the anniversary of a long-standing restaurant in the Bay Area that has managed to stay alive in this devastating period for restaurateurs. Its owner suggested we meet up at the delicious restaurant Boulet Larder. This Ferry Building’s beacon of cuisine also promotes voter engagement and voting rights across the United States through Dine For Democracy, an umbrella organization funding a coalition of grassroots organizations that unites chefs, bakers, restaurants and diners. If we were to make an exception to skipping Family Night, this felt like a good one.

As I waited to join our small group of friends outside, I sat on a bench on the backside of the Ferry Building. Alcatraz tour boats were tied up to their moorings, and their ticket booths were closed, with dates of service last updated in March 2020.

A ferry boat arrived from Tiburon and docked in front of me. In March, hundreds of people would have spilled off the commuter boat then, elbowing each other for space. That night, only a dozen people walked on and off, and all passengers and crew wore masks. All respected the orders of nearby signs which suggested standing twelve pigeons apart.

The seagulls cried overhead, screeching out of frustration for the few scraps they found to nibble on. Gone was the background noise of clinking glasses and silverware from the building’s restaurants as they were all closed. Even my beloved bookstore, where I had once read my work aloud to a small audience, was shut down.

A young girl sat at a picnic table near me playing “UNO” with her mother and her sister.

“I wish this could be my classroom,” she said to her mother, and pointed at the Bay. “I never want to look at a screen again.”

I had heard both my kids say the same earlier in the day. After a few months of online schooling this past spring, screen time went from being coveted by my kids to something they now dread.

I called my brother on the East Coast, and learned that he was digesting the news that some of his Manhattan friends were moving permanently out of The Big Apple for the suburbs in a pandemic panic.

We, too, have seen numerous friends here flee the city, even the state, and, in some cases, the country.  I looked at my watch, realized I needed to make my way down the wharf for dinner, and quickly ended my call.

I stood up and started walking away but was abruptly stopped by an urgent voice behind me.

“Can you give me a hand?” she implored.

I turned around to find a homeless woman in her sixties, clothed in mismatched layers of blankets, parked sturdily in a wheelchair, against the window of the bookstore.

I had noticed her before I sat down but she had slipped into the landscape as, alas, most homeless do in this city. The visible problem of homelessness has become invisible to many here, and our engagement with it is to disengage from it.

Pre-COVID-19 times, my kids and I used to roll down the car window at traffic lights, and offer a protein bar or a bag of chips to those begging on the streets.  But, in COVID-19 times, these people are even more untouchable, and the six feet apart takes on an entirely different meaning with them.

Numerous plastic bags, presumably filled with her only belongings, hung off the handles of her wheelchair like buoys. This was her home on wheels, and she hid within it. Her feet were covered in thin socks with holes, revealing chapped and swollen toes. Her legs extended on the chair’s leg rests, and she was seated like a droopy capital T. She gripped the chair’s arms to sit up straight but was defeated by her own guttural groan and her slumped-over shoulders. Wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves, she couldn’t raise her chin to meet my eyes.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Could you please push me to the ladies’ room inside? I’m too tired to wheel myself. Don’t you have a minute?”

It’s a question I’m asked daily by my kids and my husband, and often by anyone calling on the phone, whether they are my parents or pollsters. If this pandemic period has taught me anything, it has been to slow down. Here was the pop quiz I’d been waiting for, after all these months of self-reflection on our speedy lives: could I sacrifice my own time – just a minute -- to help someone else?

I looked at the trio of women playing UNO, who had heard the plea themselves, but they would not lock their eyes with mine.

I tightened my mask, walked towards the elderly woman, and noticed instantly how she smelled of talcum powder. The scent catapulted me to my childhood babysitter, and I knelt down to listen.

“The Ferry Building closes soon, and I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Please push me there.”

Here we were, woman to woman, potential mother to daughter, panicked in a pandemic, united in sisterhood by our gender and location. I would do this in “normal times,” wouldn’t I? Why not now?

I stood behind her, gripped the handles of her wheelchair, and pushed her forward. Her chair and its belongings weighed more than she did. I felt as if I were steering a Costco shopping cart packed with four dozen liters of bottled water.

Pedestrians looked at the two of us, and likely thought we made an odd couple. I was dressed in jeans, boots, a long coat and a silk scarf, having discarded my pandemic uniform of yoga pants and running shoes for my big night out. I imagined that my slight touch of mascara and eye liner looked clown-like next to the dullness of her pallid forehead and droopy eyes.

I asked her name, and she refused to tell me. She told me that sharing her name had previously led to abuse and violence. She craved invisibility for her own safety.

I asked her how long she had been out there.

“You mean today or in life?” she answered. “A couple of hours so far today.”

I wanted to hear her story, and started asking her questions. Our arrival at the entrance of the ladies’ room truncated our conversation.

She instantly started advising me how to steer her wide wheel chair through the narrow entranceway. Given the precise vocabulary she used to orchestrate not hitting the corners and walls, I had a feeling I was not the first person who had wheeled her through this. She knew exactly which bag to take off the left and move to the right, which one to rest on her lap. She insisted I not let anything touch the ground.

 “I have loads of friends with Ph.Ds from Stanford,” she said. “They tell me to avoid all the muck on the floor. Whatever you do, don’t let anything touch the tiles in there.”

Two women washing their hands saw us enter, and scurried away like terrified mice. She pointed towards the handicapped stall, and steered me through it with her commands as if using a video-game joystick to position exactly where she needed to land.  

Once inside the stall, she instructed me to leverage the weight of her bags for when she anticipated propping herself on the toilet seat. She clutched her saddle-bag to her chest. She insisted I wipe off the toilet seat with a paper toilet covering, and prepare the seat for her arrival. I did as I was told, and my legs shook.

 “You can go now,” she said. “I need my privacy. You did all I asked for. Bless you.”

 She insisted that the cleaning crew would shut her out unless she peed while she could. I hesitated to leave her, fearful that she would fall. Who would take care of her afterwards? She shooed me away like a strict grannie, and all I could do was obey.

I washed my hands, and exhaled. She groaned from the stall. I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to blink away my tears without touching my face.

Once outside, I felt a sort of feeling I can only describe as stage fright. My legs shook, my breath felt short, and my stomach was turning.

The panic of COVID-19 kicked in, and angered me as I debated whether or not I should return to her. As I was contemplating what to do, I saw the friend we were meeting for dinner approaching me with a big smile. I wanted to fall into her open arms but I knew I couldn’t. She held out the jarring, flexed-elbow extension we all use now in greeting each other. She was in a different world than mine at that moment, and she swept me up into hers. I inhaled deeply, and walked with her towards the restaurant, away from the restroom.

A few minutes later, when my husband joined us, I tried to smile but my heart ached for what I had left behind in the bathroom. It felt wrong to eat, to be merry, to be warm among friends, to later go home, and to sleep under a roof, with a toasty bed and clean tiles. I hated COVID-19 more than ever in that moment, and wanted nothing more than to go back and help her maintain a sense of dignity.

 But, I didn’t.

All I could think as I tried to justify my behavior were some words of the philosopher Simone Weil:

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

I had given her my attention, and my minute, plus a few more, but I didn’t give her enough. One day, I hope to learn her name.

Last night, I was driving home and stopped at a traffic light in front of The Ferry Building. I waited for the pedestrians to cross the street, and she was one of them. A policeman was struggling to push the wheeled-mountain she lives within just as I had. From their hand gestures and body language, they interacted with each other in a way that seemed familiar, as if this was the nightly routine to the end of her every day. I don’t know where he was taking her. But, I bet he knew her name.