Dr. Oz was on.
Somebody talking about nuts
Which ones were good for you, which ones were bad.

We were a rapt audience in the waiting room, each one of us happy for the bland distraction, but also sincerely curious. Something had happened in our lives that had changed us. We’d all crossed a line, moving from our natural selves to the types of people who now hoped if only they ate the right kind of nuts then everything would be okay. A woman leaving the clinic stopped and looked at me. Having noticed the oxygen concentrator on my back she abruptly said, “I HOPE YOU DON’T SMOKE!” I assured her that I didn’t, that I had quit, and as I was saying this the person who had accompanied her said– in a voice meant to convey to us that we should think of this woman as a child–“It would be great if you could quit, too, Beverly! Maybe this man can tell you how to do it?” And we all stopped watching Dr. Oz. We all stepped from our anxieties. No longer thinking of ourselves as people who needed to be helped, we thought of ourselves as people who needed to help. And in this, we were released. The grief that had hung in the room dispersed, and as if by saintly intent, we were left there, still and light for a moment, the tv flickering irrelevantly in the corner.

A handsome and confident young man, a few years older, approaches them. He’s wearing an expensive leather jacket that looks at home on him, almost accidental. He flips easily between French and English, bums a smoke from the girl and proceeds with an irresistible seduction. It’s a cruel display of power. The North African no longer shimmers or flashes his brilliant smile. His posture collapses and all vitality is drained from his face as the girl, now laughing and alert in a different way, lights her cigarette off of the newly dispensed one held so perfectly in the stranger’s hand.

Just as I was about to move forward and pay for my items an old woman stepped wordlessly in front of me in the line. I looked down and saw that she had left her basket on the floor there before me. She dropped a few items into it and made a point of avoiding eye contact with me before pointing her chin up and away in a haughty, indifferent way. It irritated me a little bit, the way that these types of things do, and I watched her. Her hair was touchingly dyed the way that all grandmothers seem to colour their hair and the paint on her fingernails was chipped and fading, her fingers bent and swollen. On the back of each hand was a small, gauze bandage that had been taped into place by a nurse, little, island bruises spreading out from beneath— the signs of chemotherapy. When she left the store she got into a red Sentra that was idling in front, and sat down and smiled as if relieved. Her daughter or granddaughter, the woman who was driving, also smiled and they drove off, the old woman now happy, her basket full of the vegetables she need to make that special dish for her family who still remained.

Heading home I passed a beautiful young woman. The sunlight caught her hair and her cheeks were pinched  a healthy rose by the autumn. Her right leg was in a brace and she used a cane to help as she threw one side of her body in front of the other, heaving up the street toward the subway, beauty and sadness falling indiscriminately upon the world around us.