Some years ago, when I lived in Boston, there was an old man in a hat who always sat on the same bench in the park as I walked by on my way to work, his hands clenched on the head of his cane. The blue, wingspread birds tattooed on the back of each of his hands complemented his erect posture, his ancient, sharply creased trousers, and the martial tilt of his fedora. He sat still, never spoke. I disliked him on sight. He was so obviously a military buzzard, puffed up with love for his country and the lust to obliterate all other countries.

One day as I passed, a platoon of policemen in heavy blue uniforms was drilling in the nearby street. I was not at all surprised to see a smile on the old man’s face as he watched them. He saw me coming and nodded for the first time in all the weeks I had walked by him.

“They look like soldiers, don’t they?” he croaked. I agreed, delighted that my analysis of his character was substantiated.

“Yes.” He grinned, watching the close-order turn and turn again of the blue mass. “They tried to catch me, but I was too quick. I ran away from the First World War and I ran away from the Second World War. Thank God by the time the Korean War came, I was old enough they left me alone. Spent all my young years avoiding this war and that, the Spanish war—somebody was always offering up a war, but I ran like a whitehead every time.” And his face bunched into a grin, his mouth opened wide to let out a fat laugh.

There was also a woman in a flowing gown who stood in the lobby of the concert hall and said, softly, gently, to her companion, “If you look at her again I am going to lie down right here on the floor and writhe around biting as many ankles as I can before they get me.”

Or the silver-haired schoolteacher in the wedge-heeled oxfords who declared to her nearsighted colleague, “I could never have married. After eight hours in public each day, I spend the whole evening farting.”

There was the awkward couple on the banks of the River Charles, her skirt rucked up and his fly undone, the King James Bible (Red Letter) open on their communal lap.

And the old man and the young girl, each in silver lamé shoes, tap-dancing together on the echoing tile floor of the ladies’ room in the train station at two in the morning.

And the small pale boy who calmly told the bus driver that he wished everyone in the world were dead so he could cross the streets by himself. “There wouldn’t be anyone to drive,” he said.