I suppose most of us carry around a mental image of what “normal” is. When I was young, normal was something like my family: mother, father, three children, two grandmothers living nearby, some cousins. Of course, my family wasn’t normal. My father was a witty, bright alcoholic who was angry and anxious, and who became a sort of vagrant later in life, and my mother was a neurotic person who tried and failed to placate and manage him, and who became a microbiologist and then an Episcopal priest and married yet another alcoholic.

Sometimes when I am talking to some of my young friends, and they talk about what normal people are like, I invite them to consider busy highway rest stops, and to mentally look around them. “That’s what normal looks like,” I say. Somehow, this is a compelling image, because in highway rest stops, there are people of all descriptions milling about in that echoing space of rattling tables between the so-called gift shop and the fast food franchises. Those people, who you did not know were tooling along the highway beside you until now, do not fit the human baggage-size frame-tester many of us carry around in our heads. You don’t fit “normal,” either.

In fact, though human beings would look identical to some hypothetical giant alien, up close we are alarmingly diverse. To notice that requires paying attention, though.

Yesterday, for instance, on my way to the thrift store, I passed someone I see regularly, a gentleman swaddled in fleece blankets and reclining on a steam vent. Sometimes parts of him are visible, but yesterday it was cold and so I could not see his hands or his feet. He lives there. After a while, he won’t, if experience is a guide; either he will die or he will go elsewhere. There are a fair number of people like him in my city, so I do not find them surprising. They are normal.

Two blocks further on, for instance, another gentleman was talking to himself on a corner. He had a sign, and a cup. The cups are usually disposable plastic, with a rough pebble or two to keep them from blowing away. There are never any bills in the cup, because the panhandlers stow the bills away immediately. You see, people will steal money that belongs to homeless people. I keep a few dollars in my wallet, and I leaned down and put three into the plastic cup. “Thank you very much,” said the gentleman in a very normal voice, and resumed talking quietly to himself. “You’re welcome,” I said and proceeded to the thrift store.

While I was not buying the only sweater that caught my eye on the racks, another gentleman raised his voice in the store. I gathered that he was explaining to the anxious clerk who was following him around, “You don’t need to call the manager.” At least, I caught the word “manager.” Another clerk joined the conversation and the gentleman charged about the store determinedly while they followed him. Shoplifting is pretty normal, even shoplifting in thrift shops. I have friends who announce to me that they do it regularly, out of some sense of righteous grievance against capitalism. I don’t myself, but the people who are shoplifting are not the ones you think they are.

I stood at the front of the store zipping up my jacket, half listening to the discussion, and then left to wander around the holiday shops surrounding City Hall, where, again, surprisingly few people would have fit my childhood conception of “normal.”

Sometimes suburban or rural acquaintances ask me, “Aren’t you afraid to live in the city?” They have a vision of my existence that they have gathered from news items, you see, and they think they are safe in comparison. But the city, like that highway rest stop, is just where we all are visible for inspection. In the suburbs, in the country, everyone is contained in their houses, going about their peculiar lives in private, where no one can see what they’re really like.

I always joke that outside the city is where people murder their acquaintances and bury them in the yard and nobody finds out about it except by accident, but really, that happens everywhere, cities too. You just can’t see it as easily.

After the thrift shop, I met up with my adult child, and we went to the bookstore and then the coffee shop, just as if we were normal people, because of course we are. Aside from all the very interesting ways in which we aren’t.