I thought you were from somewhere else.

I took a long two-hour walk today all through Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Boreum Hill, Cobble Hill, Gowanus, Park Slope and Prospect Heights and then finally back to Clinton Hill. When I was two blocks from my apartment, this crazy women asked me for the time. Seriously she had a beard, no joke. I told her the time, and then we both looked up the street to the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, which was showing the wrong time.
"You can never depend on it."
"Yeah..."
"I need to know the time, because I have a phone call to make."
"Uh huh"
She had come up to me in the middle of the crosswalk and by this time I'd crossed the street, but she kept talking to me.
"Where are you from?"
"Here"
"New York? You seem like you're from somewhere else. Some other state."
I keep walking up the street, and she keeps following me, trailling me by a few feet.
"When's your birthday?"
"October"
"October what?"
"Sixth"
"Libra. My friend's a Libra. My dear brother's birthday is October 1st."
I'm not even trying to respond anymore. It's dusk, like the French say, entre le chien et le loup.
"I haven't seen him for twenty-seven years. He got married twenty-six years ago and the last time I saw him was the year before that. He lives in Nassau. He won't come into the city and I won't go into the country. I thought you were from somewhere else."
I'm starting to get nervous, because we're around the corner from my apartment and I don't want this crazy woman to know where I live. But just in front of the library she stops walking abruptly, like there's an invisible wall only she can see.
I don't know what it is about me, but I've always had this ability to attract the walking wounded, the lost souls. Yesterday, I started talking to a woman, about the architecture of tenement houses. Somehow my art history major at NYU came up.
"Oh!" She said, like I had just revealed my prediliction for eating glass. I was a little taken aback.
"I know how smart you are! Do you know what you learned? I'll tell you what you learned. You learned you how to read people," she said ticking them off on her fingers. "You learned how to look at things, you learned how to analyze people."
"Yeah..." I was dumb. I felt like I was having my palm read.
I thought I had majored in art history because I liked the pretty pictures. I thought I was from here.