Humble Heroism

A subway story that won't make the news

My favorite kind of subway commute is an uneventful one. Most people just want to get to their destinations, but in a city as busy and teeming as New York, “events” happen all the time. The collective hope is always: “please not today.”

This is a subway story that won’t make the news, but as soon as it happened, I wanted to tell everyone about it and I wished that more people could have seen it too.

Seeing this humble act of courage and compassion moved me and made me wish to live in a society that values wisdom over scandal and clickbait.

In the end, everyone went back to minding their own business, the cardinal rule of being a New Yorker most of the time. And I got the uneventful subway commute I always hope for.