I was having lunch with a friend and we decided that a good meet-up place would be on the huge lower level of SEPTA, the Philadelphia region’s public transportation authority in center city, as she had an appointment there to renew her senior free transit ride card. There are very few people there these days as, because of COVID, many fewer are riding buses, and also, one needs an appointment now to do any business there in order to cut down on public contact. As I waited for her, I noticed two heart-warming occurrences. The first was a very tall, older local woman helping a petite, older Asian woman to procure what I imagined to be her very first SEPTA senior free ride card. I envisioned them, after leaving the building, using their cards to take a bus ride so that the new arrival would know where to place her card for verification each time she got on a bus. I thought should it be necessary for me to again live in Philadelphia due to medical or other issues, that, in addition to again teaching ESL to new immigrants as I did for 14 years in the past as a volunteer, I could help newcomers in the way I had just witnessed to get done what they needed, but about which they might have no knowledge nor the language capability yet to handle it on their own.
A few minutes later, I witnessed a woman teaching another woman who was blind, perhaps newly so, and with a cane, how to take the escalator, to me a somewhat-daunting enterprise even for a sighted person. Up and down they went several times, and I marveled at how completely perfect this huge, usually bustling, but now nearly deserted area was for these types of endeavors. In this case, I, as a person with multiple serious eye issues, didn’t picture myself as the helper, but rather as the one needing instruction and guidance, and how grateful I would be for the people who provided it, as either employees of some organization, or as volunteers.