Incidental acts ripple far, wide

One way to gauge the size and nature of a place is by the number of years you have to live there before you regularly bump into a friend at the local library book sale or in line for a soft serve at Dairy Queen. In smallish towns, it may only be a matter of months; in cities it could be five years, or 10.

In Los Angeles, if you don’t count -- and you shouldn’t -- those brush-by encounters with folks you recognize from reruns of “The Practice,” it’s probably closer to 15.

This life-among-strangers has many benefits -- why change out of your boxers and sweatshirt? Who you gonna see? Certainly it makes errand-running more efficient -- no socially required chats while the frozen peas melt and take root in the back seat.

But for those who draw strength from a continually refreshed sense of first-name-basis community, anonymity can be daunting. The image of the Cold Impersonal City, in which it is impossible to touch the lives of those around us in a Meaningful Lasting Way, has been suckled by pastoral-leaning poets, novelists and songwriters ever since sons and daughters abandoned the farm for ye olde Williamsburg.

This is why so many urban dwellers greet the holiday season with repeated viewings of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “If I had never been born,” they sob as it is revealed how George Bailey unwittingly and single-handedly saved Bedford Falls from itself, “the world would be exactly the same.”

Which could not be further from the truth.

Far from being more impersonal than a small town, city life requires that our paths crisscross thousands of others every single day, and rarely without impact.

Consider for a moment 4 or 5 miles of the south lane of the Harbor Freeway simmering in a Sunday afternoon gridlock. The cause? On the east shoulder, a man in a white SUV is getting a ticket. No guns, no blood, no on-foot pursuit into the commuter lane. Yet at some point early on in the proceedings, at least four drivers decided they were curious. Then the four drivers behind them decided there must be something really exciting happening and they slowed down too. Within moments, the freeway was on lockdown, hundreds of cars bumper to bumper for close to half an hour.

In each of these cars a story is unfolding. In one, let us, based on past personal experience, imagine an argument that would have been blown cool at 65 mph, but on this day erupts into Defcon 5 fight. This leads eventually to a divorce, which the children never entirely accept, or at least the eldest son does not. He winds up being the amusing, yet slightly emotionally abusive, social studies teacher at a high school back east. Students are strangely drawn to him, including one promising young woman who comes to adopt his nihilist world view and eventually becomes secretary of State.

Or the fight leads to a steamy reconciliation that produces a third child with an alarming temper who teaches herself to play the piano at age 3 and goes on to write a Broadway musical hit based on the Barry Manilow songbook that at last destroys the American theater but makes millions in foreign video sales.

You see where this is going.

Like Ray Bradbury’s doomed yet highly influential last butterfly, the most incidental action can ripple wide. Sitting in gridlock, a person could miss an interview and lose a job, or be struck by artistic inspiration, decide that padding his expense account isn’t really stealing, or idly make a cell phone call that will change her life. None of which would have happened if he or she were busy actually driving.

A chain reaction

Urban communal contact -- standing in line at Trader Joe’s, hanging at the playground off Ventura Boulevard -- may be short-lived, but it is not shallow. For one thing, anonymity is often confused with invisibility; in a city, people do and say things in public that they would take behind closed doors in a small town.

In Los Angeles especially, where people forget that windshields are made of glass through which most people can actually see, each day is full of fleeting and powerfully glimpsed intimacies -- the twentysomething couple pressed against the wall of a racquetball court overcome by a passion that has reached the stage where even flesh seems an unbearable boundary; the Russian family whose multilingual argument spills onto a Glendale sidewalk gone pale blue with night; an elderly Chinese couple creeping across a Broadway crosswalk, oblivious to the changing light, the young junkie, noisome and nodding on the cathedral’s plaza steps.

Like a painting, like a poem, these images can spark a series of thoughts, a chain of events that can change a conversation, a mood, a life. For better or worse.

The contact is not confined to the visual. Whether it’s the tiny round woman in the dry cleaners who never fails to smile or the guy who just cut three people off trying to exit the 405 at Getty Drive, in a city, what we do, whatever we do, invariably touches many other people.

Some few can point to the medical wings they’ve established, the arts centers they have funded or designed, but the rest of the populace shapes a city just as surely, if more subtly, like termites filigreeing the baseboards or a stone in a stream that eventually shifts an entire river. Street gangs are made of people making a series of often mundane choices that will affect many; so are the faculty rooms of elementary schools and the cubicle-infested offices where people do the work that allows the world to function.

It’s much easier to be George Bailey in a small town; the effect you have on others is so often much more immediate and tangible. In a city, the daily choice to, if nothing else, harm none, comes down to personal mettle. The community is there, all around, but they aren’t usually dropping by with casseroles. Like the confidence that allows us to hurtle fearlessly along the Harbor Freeway until some looky-loo stops traffic, the notion that one small, anonymous action can change the lives of many is something we must take on blind faith.