On my way to run an errand yesterday, I began to cross Walnut Street at Broad Street in Center City Philadelphia, and realized there were no cars. It must be one of the Open Streets Sundays, when Walnut becomes temporarily pedestrian. I looked down and saw little groups of lawn chairs, small awnings with offerings from the stores, and groups of people out strolling and shopping.

I stopped, abandoned my errand, and headed down Walnut. At one of the awnings, I got a 15-minute free sports massage from a young man who was patient and accurate. The line at the next awning was too long, or I would have spun the wheel to see what prize I won from the Bellevue Stratford.

In the next block, I sat down in one of the small clusters of empty webbed lawn chairs in the middle of the street, just to listen for a moment to a man who was playing the electronic organ under an awning.

Another woman sat down near me, and she turned toward me with a delighted expression. “It’s wonderful what the Center City District is doing with these Open Streets days,” she said. I agreed and reminisced about the time one of our mayors tried to do something permanent for pedestrian traffic on Chestnut Street, including widening the sidewalks and restricting traffic to buses and cabs, though the attempt failed. She remembered that.

We continued to talk, or rather she continued to talk to me, for the next half hour. I interrupted her from time to time, as it was the only way to get a word in, but it was pleasant and I had nowhere to be.

She had straight white hair pulled back loosely and gracefully, pale eyes, and high, firm, aristocratic cheekbones.

I know a lot about her now. She has been widowed for ten years, she lives out in the suburbs in the next town out on the Main Line from the town where I grew up, she spends a month each year in Paris, she doesn’t buy from Amazon, she likes gardens, she’s on the waiting list to get into a very respectable life care community not far from her, and she was in town to go to the ballet and was spend time enjoying Center City before the performance started.

By the time we had talked half an hour, we had established that we had a mutual acquaintance who had moved to Maine and who might actually be dead by now. Since the mutual acquaintance is in her eighties, it’s possible.

I warned the nice lady to make very sure that the skilled nursing part of a life care community was good, and she assured me she had done her due diligence. A friend of hers had moved to The Villages in Florida, and we both thought it sounded as if we would not enjoy it there.

We agreed that it was important, as you aged, to live somewhere where you could get around–me in the city, her in the suburbs. (She graciously assumed I was near her age, though she was at least ten years older.) We agreed that it was disconcerting how often we found out that people we knew were dead. We agreed that the baguettes in France were impossible to duplicate.

From time to time, the young man playing the keyboard stopped and I applauded lightly while he rubbed his hands together against the cold. My new acquaintance didn’t applaud. She just kept chatting with me. Other people sat down in the empty chairs, though they didn’t take the one between me and the lady from the Main Line.

Finally I said I was getting cold and excused myself. She asked me if I would like to go to the ballet with her, and I regretfully refused, saying I had to be somewhere. We exchanged names (hers was Carol), and I drifted away. Because I did have to be somewhere: I had to be window shopping, catching a bus home, and putting on the Phillies game.

I think should go to the ballet one of these days, though.

I’ve been thinking about her ever since, and about several other women I know. That morning, before I talked with Carol, I had spent time with a widowed friend who is just entering retirement, and before her a friend whose husband took her and her child to a distant city for a conference and then ignored her, and before that a widowed friend who has just returned from visiting her child and grandchild who had emigrated to Spain.

There are so many of us out there, making our way through the world. We are chatting with strangers, taking the bus to go shopping, going to the ballet or taking the bus to Home Depot, walking down to Parc on Rittenhouse Square to get a proper croissant, taking classes, walking miles and miles, living our lives as if we were not alone. As if we were not aging. As if everything we once knew, everyone we loved, had not moved, changed, died, or drifted somewhere else. As if we might as well enjoy a pleasant city on a sunny, chilly May day, and sit down to strike up conversations with complete strangers.

I think Carol has a lot more money than I do, though. That’s good; she’ll need it. Something about her frailty and her candor, her innocence and the cheerful privilege she possessed that let her talk to strangers, reminded me of myself. Ten years from now, when my hip hurts more and my shoulder is more painful, when my balance has deteriorated further, I hope I’m still able to move through the city as if people are kind to strangers. I hope that the city will still be as kind to strangers as it is now, too.