Each Saturday, when we’re able, Cathy and I go to our neighborhood Subway sandwich shop. Over the years, we’ve become acquainted with the family who runs the place. We’re regulars, and we’ve also made friends with another regular, Brian. We chat about our health issues, our jobs, our cats. Even when our conversations are more small talk than anything else, they can resonate because of what’s going on in our lives.

Cathy and I have missed more than a few Saturdays due to her cancer treatment, so it was good to be at Subway again and to chat with Brian for a while because it made us feel as if our life was ordinary when, of course, it’s actually so unfamiliar to us these days. We were thankful, then, for the few moments of conversation that reminded us of what connects us to other people, people like Brian who make cameo appearances in our lives.

It’s all about timing and the scope of a narrative. The latter comes from all the times we’ve seen Brian at Subway—all the times we’ve chatted and all the days during Cathy’s treatment when we’ve been absent, and Brian and the owners have wondered about us. The former has resonance because of what we’re living through. Brian will have a surgical procedure this week that should help him return to work. Cathy is supposed to resume chemotherapy this coming Friday. The owners of the sandwich shop are equally concerned about both Brian and Cathy. There’s a good deal of empathy going around that shop when we stop by on Saturdays. The shop is not only a place of commerce when we’re there; it’s also a place of comfort.

Through the ordeal of Cathy’s treatment, one thing has become so clear to us. In part, people survive because of the kindness of others: friends, family members, health care professionals, strangers. Someone like Brian can become an important person in your life. When we first saw him, he was sitting at a table by the window, eating a sandwich and reading a book. He was an interesting character at that point in his jeans and flannel shirts and his long beard nearly touching his chest. Looking at him, I couldn’t have predicted his interest in books, his care of his cats, his soft-spoken demeanor. To be honest, I might have been tempted to overlook him all together. We never know, though, how people on the periphery can come to matter so much to us.

It’s the same with so-called “minor characters” in novels. I think of the old man pedaling puppies on a New York street corner in The Great Gatsby. He’s a purely functional character. His sole reason for appearing on the page is to sell Tom Buchanan the puppy that will become an instrumental detail in the story of Tom and his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, providing a stitch in the fabric of the narrative that will propel the novel to its end. That man on the street corner appears for one scene and then is gone. He lingers, though, in his contribution to the plot of the novel.

Writers can ask themselves about the purpose of their minor characters. What are they contributing to the overall plot because they’ve performed their function well? Why will we be remembering them long after they’re gone from the pages?

On Saturday, we wished Brian well with his procedure, and he wished the same for Cathy. To be honest, once upon a time, he meant little to us. Life, though, has a way of reminding us of what’s important—the connections between people, even if only temporary. No one is insignificant, not in a novel and not in a life.