You're welcome

People who insist on oversimplifying everything horrify me. Just boil everything down, they seem to say, just remove any and all context, just skate through on the blade of what must be the most nonsensical phrase of all time: it is what it is. They have that dreadful magazine, Real Simple, which one of my brothers, prior to his lobotomy, used to call Real Stupid every time it landed on the coffee table compliments of his real silly mother in law. And for the simpletons who cannot read, there’s Judge Judy and the grand dame of simplicity with a twist of sinister, Oprah.

But every now and then I start to think they’re onto something.

Last week was nearly perfect in Portland. The days were warm enough to leave the doors open and the nights cooled down enough for blankets and thick hoodies. In the mornings, I stood before the front window in the living room, holding my first cup of coffee in one hand and the remote in the other, and looked out on a nicely framed view of why I live here: wet, pillowy clouds, veined with vague streaks of gold that would become, in two or three hours, a blue, sunny sky.

Even though I wasn’t meeting my friend until noon, I got off the bus downtown shortly after 10:30 on Friday, which was probably the most glorious of days last week. I was walking south on Sixth Avenue, just a few blocks in from Burnside – I got off way ahead of my stop – when I came to the intersection. As I stood waiting for the light to turn, a guy in the intersection, on a bike, lost control somehow and skidded to an awkward stop, which left him face to face with another biker headed the opposite direction, toward me. The back of the first biker’s calves, I noticed, were webbed with ink. He wore black pants cut off and frayed around the knees and a black shirt with long sleeves. Coming toward me, and toward the biker, was a very attractive man with black hair and one of those impossibly open faces, the kind that can go from charming to heartbreaking in a matter of seconds. He wore a brown tee shirt, faded jeans and dark work boots.

I heard the plastic hit the pavement: the biker’s water bottle flew out of either his hand or out of some sort of holder and landed in the street with the plastic version of a thud. By this time he was leaning forward on his handle bars and talking to the second biker. The very attractive man, who was crossing the street against the light, bent over, picked up the bottle and handed it to biker number one, who held his hand out, accepted the bottle without looking at the guy who had picked it up for him, and kept chatting with biker number two.

“You’re welcome,” said the guy who had picked up the bottle, a move my mother elevated to an art form and that used to embarrass the hell out of me when I was a child. Still, the biker who had been handed the bottle kept talking for a couple of seconds before saying, “Oh yeah, yeah. Thanks, man.” I stood at the corner as the attractive guy walked toward me. We made eye contact. I said, “Wow,” not as a comment on his eyes, which I thought were beautiful, but as an expression of amazement at what I’d just witnessed. So the good Samaritan with nice eyes said to me, not, I believe, in response to what I’d imagined, for a moment, was our connection but in response to the fact that he’d just had to remind an adult to say “thank you” after a perfect stranger bothered to stop and pick up something he’d dropped, “Wow is right.”

Even though I resist simplicity like it’s an infection with long-term ramifications, the whole exchange, which didn’t last for more than a minute, explained so much about the world.