SOL Tuesday: Small World

I love Flax brand clothing. Their linen pants and jackets are my summer wardrobe. And oddly, there seems to be only one store in Manhattan that reliably carries their stock. So, when my white pants wore out in the seat a couple of months ago, I went online to see where I could buy a replacement.

            I found a store in Charlottesville, Virginia. (This was before the white supremacist rally.) Ordered two pair via the Web site (so I’d have an instant replacement if/when my replacement pair wore out), had a problem about the size, called and talked to a human being, who easily fixed the problem—and I got my pants in a couple of days.

            A week later, after the horror of the white supremacists and the death of Heather Heyer, I e-mailed the store to ask if they were all okay, and they replied that they were. I felt I had a connection to this city I’ve never been to, just because I’d bought something over the Internet.

            A couple of weeks ago, my black Flax pants wore out. I couldn’t remember the style of pants I’d ordered in August, so I called the store. The woman who answered was in the midst of trying on a pair of pants for another caller, so she asked me to hold. But she continued to talk, and we chatted some about how when you’ve asked someone to hold, you feel compelled to keep talking so the other person knows you are still there, even as you are doing something else.

            When she looked up my previous order and saw I lived on Riverside Drive in New York City, she said, “Oh, I grew up at 98th and Riverside.” She added, “I went to Ethical Culture and Fieldston” (two private schools), so I added, “My daughter went to Bank Street and Columbia Prep.” Some more chat about the weather and that the windy side streets off of Riverside Drive had sent her mother out of the city.

            It wasn’t a true small world story; we didn’t talk long enough to find out whether we knew any people in common. She did have to get back to her work selling clothes. But it was still a human connection, over many hundreds of miles. 

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