Missing an opportunity to make a connection

The exchange, a monologue really, was short and awkward. But the message, uncomfortably revealing.

I was seated alone at a small neighborhood restaurant, my table separated from the serving line by a rib-high metal railing. I saw the gentleman walk in, but went right back to reading a message on my iPhone. I was in my usual early-morning, not-sohorribly-awake quiet spell and didn’t want to be interrupted.

I felt movement, glanced off to my right and found him leaning over the rail. We were eyeball-to-eyeball, inches apart.

“I would think this would be the last place I would turn into a cybercafe,” he said. I said nothing. He moved away.

Eventually he got up to leave and, walking on my left, said, without breaking pace, “An iPad would be more efficient.” Again I did not respond

But the encounter, though brief and only mildly hostile, put me in a funk.

Three hours later, I picked up a retired physician friend for lunch and he started telling me that people in his social circle liked to talk with him about their doctors.

“What I hear most is ‘Nobody tells me anything,’” he said. “And right behind that, ‘My doctor doesn’t care.’ ”

My day was moving from contentious to hearing stories of neglect. My funk deepened.

Then, I realized something disturbing: I had been indifferent to the gentleman who was only making an attempt at social contact, albeit clumsily. I felt a twinge, aware that I’d been rude. The number of lonely people around town — every town — is alarming and shameful. Clearly, he was among those who yearn for human contact.

There were a million ways the encounter could have gone.

I could have stopped my cellphone nonsense, looked at him and joked. I could have lamented about the inappropriateness of the coffee joint as a cybercafe. I could have engaged him: “Do you know a better place? Let’s go there.”

By bringing up the digital tablet in his second pass by my table, he was giving me another opportunity to connect. Instead of selfishly ducking into my cellphone silence, I could have said, “Tell me more, I have been thinking of an iPad.” It would have been an honest reaction, and my guess is he was in or had been in the computer business — he seemed to know his stuff.

I missed two chances to make things better for another human being. My day did not improve, nor did his.

By offering nothing I became a part of his problem, and the indifference that rules too much of today’s world.

My bad.