The Kindness of Strangers

So there I stood, waiting in the bus shelter down by the dollar store on Broadway near Lloyd Center, making idle chit-chat with a woman in a wheel chair who was waiting for a different bus than I.

Or rather, she was making idle chit-chat with me; I don't often strike up conversations with strangers first, but will (most of the time) engage them to pass the time, especially if they seem harmless and not particularly annoying.

I rarely spoke to her face-on, since her chair was turned towards traffic; I mostly saw a quarter-view of her cheek, her right ear, her wiry brown hair, her eye. She was from Tillamook, she said, speaking her words into the damp air that hung between us, and had spent the last 3 days in the Big City of Portland and was good and ready to get home to her cranky husband (her description) and her cozy wood-burning stove; I understood that woodsmoke was a smell she loved, and currently missed. I listened, nodded, and uttered a few words of polite affirmation to this complete stranger, speaking mostly to the back edge of her right ear.


And then, just as her bus approached, she turned her head around to look up at me, and I politely returned her gaze and noticed as I did so that her mostly bored, placid expression changed dramatically. Her eyebrows arced up as her jaw dropped open, giving her a look of utter surprise. She cocked her head slightly, still staring up at me, and said, with a note of awe, "You have beautiful teeth....are those yours?"

For most of my life, I have been fairly self-conscious about my teeth; while they are all uniform and pretty straight and, thankfully, very white, they are large, and I've never worn braces to correct my overbite; I realize, in sharing this description, that I probably sound as if I look like one of those Hillbilly hand puppets with the big crooked overbitten teeth, which would be not only an extreme, but an inaccurate embellishment. And, while I do like my big grin, I don't spend a lot of time actually talking about it.


But now I had a complete stranger gazing up at my chops in wonderment, and I was ridiculously, sweetly flattered. I had to laugh, bearing my teeth even more, and just before she boarded her bus I assured her that they were, indeed, all real and all my own.

And then I thanked her for the compliment and she was gone, headed back to wherever it is her cranky husband would meet her to take her back to the cool ocean mist of Tillamook and the good-smelling wood-burning stove, and I, in turn, boarded my own bus, me and my big, real, impressive teeth, and headed home.