It was in the fall of 1989 and I was living in New York City. Back then I felt New York was unsafe and that a violent crime could happen anywhere in the city at any given moment. I remember someone had told me a homeless person shot a woman who refused to give him some money and I think it was on the news. During that year it was common to be harassed on the streets by homeless people and I was fearful of them.
My girlfriend and I lived on 116th and Amsterdam, which like many neighborhoods in Manhattan back then, wasn’t the safest, so we also lived with a certain level of fear. My girlfriend was a graduate student in Columbia University and I worked part-time for their sociology department as an administrative assistant. I was spending some months in New York city, wondering what to do with my life, whether I should finish my undergraduate studies there or return to Madison, Wisconsin, where I had been a student for two years.
So one night my girlfriend and I were in Midtown somewhere, on our way back home, and as we walked, a homeless man got on our way and asked us for money. He blocked our path so we stepped to one side to avoid him but he wouldn’t let us get by him. We then quickly darted to his other side but he blocked us again. I started to become desperate and my fear escalated thinking he might be carrying a concealed weapon. I hurried across the street walking as fast as I could pulling my girlfriend behind me by the hand but the man persistently stayed right in front of us, blocking our path. I became very frightened. Just as I started to feel completely powerless, and that this situation would inevitably become a tragedy, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an old man dashed between the homeless man and us, saying something out loud that I don’t remember right now, but this action saved us. The homeless man left and we were able to go home unharmed.
Photo by V O Y T A H on Pexels.com
What the old man did was a surprise to me and whenever I have thought of what happened that day I realize the old man purposely tried to help us when he saw we were in despair. Obviously maybe nothing would have happened to us because perhaps the homeless man was just a harmless bully. But whatever the outcome would have been, it is clear that a small force can divert a much larger force, like a small tap in the right place on a man’s foot can cause him to trip and fall.
Copyright © 2012 Jorge Luis Carbajosa
El descampado 