Arrivederci Trombonista

Share the love, whatever your instrument

Cycling on New York streets means always being a second from danger. Drivers of cars and trucks are a constant hazard but, though less dangerous, more aggravating are other cyclists. And don’t get me started on motorized bikes and scooters. Whether cycling the wrong way down bike lanes, turning without warning or just weaving around it seems like they should know better.

The other morning I’d dropped my child at camp and was cycling home. I’d just avoided some massive truck whose side panel read, “On God’s Business,” parked squarely across the bike lane at a tricky corner, when I encountered a musician cycling pretty erratically with her instrument case strapped to her back.

We were travelling the same direction and about the same speed, because she was slowed by her case and I by my creaky Citibike. I was annoyed because there were many other obstacles to contend with, without adding an unsteady companion driving all over the lane. We both stopped at a traffic light.

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I really felt like yelling at her, but instead — two people cycling with helmets and no masks in the very same place at the very same time — thank goodness, I asked her what her instrument was.

“A trombone,” she replied, to my surprise.

“Are you on your way to play?”

“No, it’s not even 9.30 but I’m already done!” She said, pausing as if she was wondering whether she should tell me what the occasion was, but the lights were about to change.

“Better to be out of puff on the way home from playing than out of puff on the way to play!” I said, using an idiom that I hadn’t heard except from my grandfather, in the last millennium.

But maybe I used it because Grandpa was always amiable, always ready to start a friendly conversation with strangers and quick to forgive — certainly quick to forgive his grandchildren! As we cycled on, we were acquaintances already. Friends are more forgiving.

Yes she was erratic, but we had a cycle lane and it was perfectly practical to avoid her. In truth she probably wasn’t much older than my daughter and would I want a big irascible man yelling at my daughter cycling home — even if she was spinning noodles around the rules of the road? No, I would not.

Rather than frown, I resolved yet again to add some public cheer to my critical (perhaps even at time sanctimonious) behaviour. It reminded me of an informal initiative I’d begun for my running: A Smile a Mile. It’s difficult to compliment people from your bike and it’s tricky to give a compliment that’s clear and pleasant without being icky. Never praise something that’s not a choice and not changeable.

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Compliments should be, well, complimentary, with no expectation from giver or receiver that there should be anything in return. There should be no awkward thought of recompense, either of the “I like your shirt, too” nature or of anything more personal. But if you stay in the same space as the person you have spoken to — even if it’s an innocent train platform, crosswalk or Starbucks’ queue, an expectation of response can hang overhead. Running, though, is perfect time for compliments.

There’s time to appreciate your surroundings and to smile at people. People have the opportunity to see you smiling. If there’s something worth mentioning, there’s usually a moment to check your biases — would you could say the same thing to someone irrespective of age, gender or race? I often want to compliment people on their running styles — when they are fluid and economical — but it comes too close to commenting on an attribute, not a choice.

Telling people you think they have “Awesome pants!” or a “Cute dog!” may seem like weak sauce but they are uncontroversial and surprisingly affirming. We should support each other as we run the human race. As a runner I know how oddly supportive it is to hear my name from people who just read it on my shirt and shouted, “Go, Dan!” Let’s do that for life.

Yes, we need to hear hard truths, and yes we need to hear constructive criticism in order to make progress. But that can come from friends. What the world needs from strangers is more love, everyday, and expressed in the right way: Not by telling women to smile or that they have beautiful eyes. Chat up lines and verbal leers are not ways of sharing love, and the ongoing refusal of some men to recognize their own structural abusiveness — even if it’s sometimes mild — is embarrassing.

Navigating the process of sharing love with absolute strangers and familiar strangers is difficult and perhaps it begins simply, with cheerfulness. Because, when all’s said and done, we’re all strangers, we see everyone through a veil. Whether it’s the physical veil of a face mask or a zoom call or the figurative veil of personal expectations or ideology, we are not transparent and open to each other.

And thank goodness for that. The human game is all about navigating our journeys to one another, finding the vehicles and the paths to approach one another in peace. Politics and religion are two of the more obvious fields of action that consider how best to live together. Each in their own way shows how to come together and, in a best-case scenario, lay tracks to a world where we behave to others as they would wish us to behave to them.

The online world provides a whole new test of how we behave to friends, to friends of friends and to strangers. We forget how recent and evolving this all is — if Facebook was an American child, it’d still be in high school, Twitter’s Sweet Sixteen would be next March, YouTube couldn’t drink yet — even in Europe. Until politics, religion and the billionaires whose companies shape the Internet start to reward love and discourage baseless hatred, it’s up to us as online inhabitants to smile and ignore as we would in the physical world.

So the trombonista and I cycled past the crazies on the sidewalk preaching their racist, anti-science version of the Bible, she and I ignored the stickers on the road signs with their snappy slogans and we quite frankly didn’t enquire as to the thoughts of the fellow travelers on Central Park West on the latest news just because we happened to be in the same place as them. We certainly did not engage with any robot-generated rhetoric intended to divide us.

No, instead we headed toward Duke Ellington Boulevard just before which I peeled off left. Instead of making two people angry and anxious I had used whatever privilege I had from being big, white-looking and male to add to both of our happiness and welfare. And, as I waved goodbye, it wasn’t yet 9.30.

“Arrivederci trombonista.”

——

The photograph above, is not the trombonista I met, but a Mardi Gra trombonista, photo taken by Infrogmation of New Orleans.