Consequential Strangers

“Hi, Maggie.” She looked so familiar, the tattooed young runner who greeted me as we passed each other on the bridge across the Clackamas River. “Karen, from Dr. Burnett’s office,” she offered when she saw the vague recognition on my face. I grinned. My heart leapt to see her. She is part of the missing ring.

The innermost ring of my life now consists of my little dog and me. The next ring out holds my sons and their families. Then there’s the ring for rest of my relatives. then the one for my dearest friends. The next ring out holds my close friends and, further out, the beloved people from the groups I belong to. You get the picture.

Thanks to Zoom and Skype and Facetime, I visit more often with my people than I ever did before the Corona virus lockdown. The monthly lunches happen electronically every week now. The cousins I saw once a year on the hot sand beaches of Delaware now appear on my computer screen every other Sunday.

But the doctor’s receptionist, the post office clerk, the grocery worker, the waitress? The neighbors whose dogs I recognize though I have no idea where the owners live? The barista in the coffee shop? Those people, along with their greetings and weather comments and small talk, have vanished from my life. That whole ring of local people is gone. I didn’t know how much I would miss them.

I should have known, because I was once in that ring. I spent years answering reference questions at public libraries. Libraries are busy places, and anybody can ask the reference librarians anything, but we knew our regulars. The investors checking Value Line every day, the worried well looking up their pills or their mental health diagnosis, the lifer genealogists with their microfilm. We recognized the retired men who read newspapers all day, and we grew alarmed when our one homeless couple didn’t show up for a few days in a row.

Although we knew our customer’s reading preferences and hobbies and research projects, we never commented on them, or speculated among ourselves. Privacy was sacrosanct. We were trained never to comment on people’s reference questions, never to ask them anything beyond what information we needed.

I broke that rule one time. In the days before Google, the woman on the phone asked, “Do cockroaches have sexual or asexual reproduction? “ I found the answer and reported it to her, complete with citation. But I couldn’t help myself. “Why do you want to know that? “ I asked. She replied, “Well, I only saw one.”

Occasionally we would have somebody who just wanted to talk, but most of the time our conversations were time-limited. And yet, the brief exchanges were somehow personal. We knew they were important beyond the answers or the book recommendations or the computer tips.

We were what the sociologists call consequential strangers in the lives of our library users. We were acquaintances beyond their families and friends, with whom they had a personal and repeated pattern of interaction. We had weak ties, but we were always there. Our exchanges were patterned, functional, and formal, but somehow personal. For library patrons, we were part of that crucial outer ring.

It’s been rare but moving when the consequential strangers in my life have broken through the usual forms. A few weeks after my partner Judy’s death, the mailman noticed a change and asked, “Did she die? I’m sorry.” And the library clerk, tentative about crossing a boundary, asked me, “Was it your partner who died? I read the obituary. I used to see her coming in here with her oxygen tank.” It meant the world to me then that the quiet people on the outskirts of my life knew Judy and recognized the loss.

The not-quite strangers in our lives ground us in our time and place. We walk in this neighborhood, we shop at that store on Wednesdays, we bide out time in this coffee shop with this special drink and these familiar counter workers. We wave at the mailman, and talk about honey with the beekeeper at the Farmer’s Market.

Where are those people now? The optician who adjusts my glasses is laid off. The librarians are working at homeless shelters or training as contact tracers for the health department. The store clerks in their masks shop for me and bring the groceries out to the car. I now order stamps by mail and pump my own gas.

When my older son was two years old, he had to arrange his stuffed animals and his Raggedy Andy doll in a set pattern around the edges of his bed before he would fall asleep. They looked like a circle of protection. They were his consequential strangers, and he needed them to be in place.

What patterns of people and transactions protect us, so we know that when we wake up from this isolation our world will still be there? Without the outer ring of casual connections, how do we stay grounded in our own time and place?

I read the social media platforms Nextdoor, Milwaukie Chit-Chat and Buy Nothing Oak Grove, but they do not connect me to my neighbors the way Zoom connects me to my closer family and friends. I have no history with the people on those sites. I have not known them in the physical world; we have no past pattern of interaction to draw on. They form a porous, amorphous circle at the far geographic edges of my life, but they are not the true outer ring.

My friends and I are beginning to focus on what we will do first when we finally feel safe to emerge from our lockdown. After I hug everybody in sight, I will go to the library, select my own produce in a grocery store, stand in line at the post office, and linger over coffee and lunch with at a restaurant. I will welcome my consequential strangers back with gratitude.