If you have ever bought a transit ticket in a European city, you know the particular humiliation of it. The machine is in French, or Italian, or whatever language you don’t speak. The coins are wrong. The interface was designed by someone who has never been confused about anything. You stand there, tourist-obvious, jabbing at the screen, while a line forms behind you.
This is why I am so grateful for the kindness of strangers. And in Lyon, last trip, we met one of the kindest.
We are calling her Mimi. She never gave us her name — you don’t always catch a name in the bustle of a train station, and she was already helping before introductions seemed necessary. She appeared at the ticket machine with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this many times. She did not wait to be asked. She simply stepped in, assessed the situation, and began helping — in excellent English, warm and unhurried, the kind of fluency that makes you feel looked after. She was about twenty, attractive, the sort of person you trust immediately and without thinking about why. We wanted two tickets. She was very particular about this — one for each of us, purchased separately, she explained. She watched carefully as we put away our credit cards. She had an eye for detail, Mimi did.
Her two young associates were equally attentive. But we didn’t know that yet.
The escalator was where the lesson really began. Mimi positioned herself ahead of us and, in her excellent English, began telling us about the joys that awaited at the top — what to see, where to go, the particular pleasures of Lyon. She was very engaging. We faced forward, listening. Behind us, two girls had stepped onto the escalator — eleven or twelve, Moroccan-looking. Someone has to be behind you on an escalator. We didn’t give them a second thought. Suddenly, halfway up, between the two floors, the escalator froze to a stop. Likely a malfunction, we thought. Mimi jabbered on anyway. Fortunately, I happened to feel a hand working its way into the pocket I had, a minute earlier, stored my credit card.
I caught her hand in mid-theft. I turned around to find the two young accomplices, I spoke sharply to her but she slipped her hand out of my grasp. She, of course, denied that anything untoward had happened. Just then, the escalator lurched forward once again.
Mimi, however, had quite a bit to say. In French. To the girls. She was not addressing us — she had, in a sense, moved on from us entirely. What she was doing, as best as I could reconstruct it from tone and gesture and the limited French of my high school years, was a debrief. A technical critique. She was explaining, with the focused displeasure of a professional whose standards have not been met, what had gone wrong. The girls listened. They did not appear to be taking notes, but they had the look of people who were filing things away.
I cannot tell you exactly what she said. My French was not up to it. But I have thought about it since, and I believe the lesson was something like: he felt the hand. Next time, do not let them feel the hand.
When the escalator delivered us to the platform, Mimi helpfully directed us to our train. She pointed with great confidence. We got on. The doors closed. The train moved.
It was going the wrong way.
By the time we sorted this out, Lyon’s transit system had put a comfortable distance between us and our educators. I have since learned that this is standard practice — not just the wrong train, but the whole curriculum. The helpful local at the ticket machine, the separate purchases, the escalator, the misdirection. It is a practiced art, and Mimi was clearly a practitioner of long standing. The local police, I am told, take a philosophical view of such transactions. Tourists pass through. Money circulates. No one gets hurt. The courts are busy.
So: thank you, Mimi. Thank you for your patience at the ticket machine, your attentiveness to our cards, your thorough supervision of the escalator exercise, and your confident direction to the wrong platform. We got where we were going eventually. We still have our wallets. And somewhere in Lyon, two young students are presumably reflecting on what they did wrong.
I only wish I knew what it was.
Curtis C. Morgan, 83, spent forty years in IT contracting across the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and Australia and ran a commercial beekeeping operation in Pennsylvania. He taught at sixty schools across Australia and New Zealand. His work has appeared in Mother Earth News, Responsible Statecraft, Drift and Dribble, and American Bee Journal.
Featured photo by Kristina Bekher (Pexels)
