Strangers

The appeal of chance encounters

Early one morning, shortly after we moved to Los Angeles, I was standing in a parking lot when a large man pedaled up to me on a bicycle and skidded to a halt. He was sunburned, covered in grime. The bike was sized for a ten-year-old boy; perhaps it had recently belonged to a ten-year-old boy. The man said in a low voice, “If I made a movie called Reven…