Debbie Sue's Reviews > Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us

I have now become the reader who goes to the library to pick up a book - and leaves with that one and three more. I chose this one on a whim. The results were unexpected.

If nothing else, these stories will take you to back to these random moments with random people in your life. A travel or an airport or a park or a museum or a store, anywhere you had a random interaction with a total stranger, sometimes unbelievably short, but somehow you remember the incident year after year. This book is a collection of THOSE stories - short vignettes- random moments in life where you meet a stranger and that person stays in your head and in your life. We all have those stories, and this book will make you remember those people..... one of mine is an elderly man named David who - by all accounts - was too old to travel alone, but he was on his second trip to New Zealand - using his time on the plane to make rosaries out of precious stones. He said when it was "his time" the "good Lord" would have to come looking for him..... ha!

My favorite snippets:
"my father is a doctor. He loves creature comforts -- a good meal, a warm bath, a nice creme brûlée. I have always envied him the brute physicality of his work, concrete in all the ways mine is not. Sometimes I wonder what I've done with my life, choosing to traffic in a thousand shades of gray."

"we are all on solitary missions leaked out to us one cryptic cable at a time"

"It was no grand gesture. You sacrificed ten cents, maybe twenty, in the act, but I remember it often. I see a car abandoned on the shoulder of the road, a mattress laid out beneath a rusting bridge, and I feel the world might collapse beneath the weight of its own indifference, and I think of you."

"...the personality I have been given is that of a frantic striver -- one who always longs to be better and do better and make it better. There are gifts in that way of being, but mostly it's exhausting and sometimes no more efficacious than waiting coolly for the right moment. I won't ever strike people as a woman complete in her own skin. I can accept my nature all I want, but my nature is, immutable, that of a person who wants to change."

"the antidote to harm is so simple. Love your neighbor. Try to help."

"so when your kids who are grown people tap-tapped their phones as you smiled and ate, reaching for your jokes, awed at everything around you -- the warm food, the lighthouse, the stranger with her strange dictionary -- I though, they will regret this. All the not-seeing."

"that's the rarest kind of stranger, isn't it? The kind that makes you feel known."