Five Friendly Philadelphians

1. The clerk at the 15th Street subway station who emerged from his booth to finesse my wrinkled $5 into a stubborn token machine.
2. The guide who stepped out from behind the information desk to better gesture where we could find Duchamp’s Étant donnés (“People never forget that one.”) and the swords and armor.
3. The old guy shoveling the front entranceway at the Rodin Museum, who said, “You must be true art lovers!” as we made our way through the part he hadn’t yet shoveled, which was most of it. (On Saturday, a storm left 28.5 inches of snow in Philadelphia, the city’s second-largest amount ever. We spent much of the weekend trudging through snowbanks and slipping on ice.)
4. The guide at Independence Hall, who noted that George Washington attracted ladies not only because he was tall but because he was an accomplished dancer, contradicting my idea of him as stiff from those Gilbert Stuart portraits.
5. The guy behind the counter at Cosmi’s Deli, which isn’t a restaurant, as I’d thought, but a tiny bodega-like store. To get there, we’d walked a long way in the cold, down the narrow, unplowed streets of South Philly, the drifts as high as the parked cars. After I bought sodas and two dripping cheesesteaks, I asked him, “Know anywhere nearby where we can eat these?” I was angling for him to let us stay and lean against the patch of counter near the coffee machine. Instead, he brought out a folding table and two plastic chairs and set them up between the beverage coolers and the deli case. We sat and ate. On our way out, I shook his hand.