Many of the students I taught in my long career had been raised to believe in “stranger danger.” In practice, that meant they never talked to anyone they didn’t already know. The problem, of course, is that child abductions are rare, and most of them happen because of custody disputes; also, child sexual abuse is overwhelmingly by people the child knows, whom the parents trust. The result of the “stranger danger” coaching was that children sometimes wouldn’t talk to me even though I was a teacher in their school. I was a “stranger” to them, so they were rude to me, which was always funny when they ended up in my classroom and had to readjust their worldview.

There’s a difference between trusting someone and talking to them, though. I don’t wholly trust anyone, honestly. That’s just unfair to them, putting your whole trust in another human being. Heck, I didn’t entirely trust my husband of 46 years, and I was right not to. He could be quite wayward, and he was often wrong. As the Russian proverb goes, “Trust, but verify.”

That’s why manipulative people are so dangerous. They make themselves your friends, so they are no longer strangers, and so people think they can be trusted.

That said, I talk to all kinds of people on the bus, in stores, on the street. I don’t have to put all my trust in them or expect them to be nice, but I can talk to them. (Of course it helps that I’m no longer young, that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)

You can talk to homeless people if you’re polite about it, and often they will have an ordinary conversation with you, because “homeless” just means you don’t have a home. No need to be rude.

You can talk to most people who are obviously mentally ill, too, because oddly enough, it’s rare for people with mental illness are violent. Do I avoid the guy walking along the sidewalk shouting and waving a stick around? Yeah. I’ll cross the street, because he’s clearly angry and clearly dangerous.

Not all angry people are dangerous, of course. Do I speak to the bus driver who is clearly indignant about the job and is staring out the window away from me when I board? Well, yeah, I’ll say “Good morning” and then go about my business. It doesn’t do me any harm. But I’m not going to push it.

I admit I do yell at people who are driving unsafely. In those situations, I’ve had a number of conversations with people who try to run me down in the pedestrian crosswalk. “If I hit you, I have insurance,” one guy shouted. Another one, as she swerved around a stopped bus and almost hit me, yelled at me for walking across the street pushing a stroller with my grandson in it, because in her opinion I was being unsafe. I don’t much yell at drivers when I’m driving myself, because something about being in charge of a danger machine makes people irrational. When I was driving, back when my kid was young, I would say, “We’re sitting down, we’re warm, and we’re safe,” whenever I had the urge to yell. Now an adult, my kid repeats that mantra.

I think about sometimes: If someone tells you to get in their car, or tries to come into your house uninvited, don’t let them. Close the door. Or run away from your house. Sure, they’re threatening you, but you are even less safe inside the car or with them in your house.

Sometimes people clearly worry about me, because I seem so pleasant and unwary in public. (Of course, they are influenced by my gender, race, age, and general presentation to assume that I’m a naïve suburbanite, but that’s a whole other issue.) I’m not trusting. I just talk to people.