I just met the nicest man on the planet.
This morning, on the way to work, everything happened completely as per usual. I didn’t spend any more or less time contemplating whether I should get out of bed, standing in the shower thinking about calling in sick, trudging the path from my house to the station. I carelessly chose a seat on the train, the man sitting opposite me was not put off by my ‘leave me alone’ stare.
Instead, he offered me a banana.
Usually, I would have been annoyed by this remark. I consider the morning ‘my time’ and generally hate it when people try and break through my personal space, but as it so happened, my shower ruminations had taken longer than normal, and so I had been forced to skip breakfast in order to make the 8:02 train. So I took the man up on his offer of a banana, thus entering myself into conversation I had no desire to partake in.
Unlike previous conversations with train-faring whack jobs, however, the man had a kind of friendliness that leached conversation out of me. It was almost impossible to resist. We got talking, and in the course of that conversation, I found out all about the best conveyancer in Melbourne. The reason why he was on the train that morning was to meet his son for breakfast to talk about buying a home. He lives in Queensland most of the year, and misses the close connection with his children, and so his son’s girlfriend had arranged for them to have a surprise meet up on that dreary Wednesday morning. When I raised the question of whether it would be a pleasant surprise or not, the nicest man on the planet just smiled at me with a twinge of sadness in his eyes.
As my stop approached, I wished the nicest man on the planet good luck with finding the conveyancing company in Bentleigh, stepped off the train, and disposed of my banana peel. The conversation had been brief, yet something about the look in his eyes as we parted ways stuck with me. It was odd to see such a nice man wearing such a look.