On the subway the other day I stood up to offer an older woman–but not really that much older than me– my seat.\u00a0The woman looked at me, irritated rather than grateful, \u201cWhy would you do that?\u201d she challenged.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I just feel like stretching, really and thought you might like to sit down, and of course, I am a very, very classy man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, you\u2019re not. I see the way you\u2019ve been looking at that black girl over there.\u201d<\/p>\n

This took me aback.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t give me that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, you know exactly what I\u2019m talking about,\u201d she pointed to a young woman sitting about 10 yards away. \u201cHer, the one with the tits. I bet you just wanted to give me your seat so you could get closer to her, get a better look, eh?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c Jesus,\u201d I said, \u201cI wasn\u2019t looking at her, I didn\u2019t even know she was there.\u201d<\/p>\n

I sat back down in the seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re at least twice her age. You could be her FATHER,\u201d the woman declared.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Across from me a woman pulled a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at the conjunctivitis that had taken hold of her left eye, and just over her shoulder her sat a woman of about 60 who had a look of abject defeat and exhaustion to her. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she had what must have been hundreds of old, cutting scars on them. Her hair was colourless and she seemed so spent on this planet as to be virtually a ghost.<\/p>\n

The woman who did not want my seat looked back at me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is it with middle-aged white guys and black girls, anyway? I mean, really? You think you have a chance?<\/p>\n

\u201cLook,\u201d I said, \u201c I wasn\u2019t looking at anybody. I\u2019m happily married. I\u2019m just a guy sitting on a subway, a guy who made the huge, terrible mistake of offering you his seat.\u201d<\/p>\n

I gave the woman a hard look, inviting her to say something else.<\/p>\n

She looked like she was going to say something, but then she bent down, picked a penny up off the floor, put it in a plastic baggie and then moved along to the next car.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the subway the other day I stood up to offer an older woman–but not really that much older than me– my seat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[138,565,177,566,118,186,569,564,563,562,568,151,567,539,77,120,570,38,561],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2622,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598\/revisions\/2622"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}