Catching the bus

The bus was there at the station across the street and I didn't want to miss it. I hurried to the corner, stopped, looked up at the crossing signal, which was red, then looked both ways. No traffic in sight. Bus about to leave without me. Just as I started across the street against the red light, I noticed that someone on the other side of the street was dressed oddly. In uniform. A police officer? I looked again. Yes, a police officer was heading across the street towards me against a red light. It took about two more steps for me to realize fully that I was breaking a law while walking directly towards a police officer. And another step to know that I wasn't going to stop. I had to catch the bus. This police officer was at least 15 years younger than me. When I was about half-way across the street, I saw that the police officer was following a man who was crossing in the opposite direction. “Hey, you aren't supposed to...” I heard the police officer say as he followed the man. The man seemed to be ignoring the officer and was bent for the corner where I had started from. We were two jaywalkers trading street corners while ignoring a police officer. As the officer and I passed each other in the middle of the street, he hesitated and began to say something to me. “I'm sorry,” I said, “but I have to catch that bus.” I pointed at the bus on the corner and kept going, hoping the policeman wouldn't decide to drop the other jaywalker and follow me instead.

After getting safely onto the bus, sans policeman, I wondered at my behavior. I hadn't even hesitated as I crossed the street. Catching my bus was clearly more important to me than avoiding censure for jaywalking from a police officer. When did this happen to me? When did I pass the point where I get to decide what makes sense, which laws I will follow and which ones I'll ignore, which persons of authority I will defer to and which ones I'll ignore? When, for that matter, did police officers get younger than me?

Watermelon 2

The boy walked beside his mother's shopping cart, studying his brightly-colored super hero figurine intently and bending the legs and arms into precise positions. When his mother stopped the cart for a moment, he twined two fingers of his left hand around a metal bar in the shopping cart and held the figurine in his other hand. The girl, who must have been a year or two younger than the boy, sat in the shopping cart seat. Her upper body swayed and her arms reached out toward colorful boxes of cereal and snack foods as her mother pushed her past the shelves. Requests for this box of cookies or that bag of potato chips issued from her mouth constantly. They conversed, the three of them, about the items on the shelves as they progressed slowly down the aisles, the mother occasionally handing one child something—a jar of pickles, a box of crackers— and checking a small list in her hand.

The mother wore blue jeans and an olive green cotton top. Probably a student at the university. He saw this family in the store regularly. One evening she had called to ask about some fish she had bought that day. The color was inconsistent, she'd said on the phone, was it okay to eat? He knew it was her because he had wrapped up the fish himself and then recognized her voice when she called. He'd had to explain that the fillets came from fish of slightly different species, so the color was different. It was fine to eat.

It wasn't as if she reminded him of anyone. It was just the way they had, the three of them, the way all families had if you watched them from a certain distance. The way they move together through the store, speaking only to each other, the way their bodies lean into each other and touch an arm against a leg, a hand to a face, and then lean away. He had known that touch, had had a son of his own, a wife. But that was so long ago and in another state altogether. But something about the way the boy's finger laced around the metal wire of the cart made his chest hurt. What had he done to lose them? Probably he would never know. It was too late anyway. The boy would be a young man now, his wife with some other man, certainly.

He rang up a purchase for an older couple. A baguette, a bottle of white wine, a wedge of Jarlsberg cheese, a carton of half-and-half, coffee beans in a small paper bag. He picked up each item and held it long enough to point a wand at a bar code or enter a number into the register, then he released it gently into a paper bag, arranging the items so that the half-and-half and wine bottle stood upright. The woman had a kind face and pushed pennies and dimes around in her coin purse, searching for exact change. The man stood at her elbow watching her progress with interest. As she handed the cashier two more pennies, the man lifted the bag of groceries with his right arm and brushed her hip with his left hand as he turned toward the door. It's like a dance, the cashier thought.

Now he saw that the young family was in the produce area, directly across from where he stood behind the register. They were inspecting the watermelons, the girl leaning from her seat in the cart, the boy standing on the edge of the crate that held the melons. The three of them leaned as a group over the watermelons, exchanging a few words, pointing to one melon, then another. The woman's hair was falling loose from a braid. Her arm rested on her son's shoulders. The boy's left arm hung at his side, his hand still grasping the super hero figure. The cashier's boy had carried around a little Bat Man figure. Or had it been Robin? He wasn't sure. It hadn't mattered to him at the time.

He helped a young couple find the baking soda, then rang up a cart full of food for a woman who was shopping alone. As he placed her change into her hand, two dollars and thirty-one cents, he saw that the young family was next in line and the mother stepped into the space across the counter from him. Now the girl was on her feet between her mother and her brother. The boy had lain his toy down at the end of the bagging counter so he could concentrate on balancing on the toes of one foot while pushing off from the side of the counter to spin in small quick circles. When he faltered and fell against his sister, causing her to fall against her mother's hip, the girl shrugged her shoulders hard and whined at her brother. The mother stopped in the middle of writing the date on her check to rest an arm around the girl for a moment, steadying and quieting her. “Find everything you needed?” he asked.

“I think so,” the mother answered, smiling at the cashier for a moment. “We're looking forward to the watermelon.”

“It's a beautiful one,” the cashier said, picking up the watermelon and placing it on the scale. He enjoyed the weight of it in his hands as he lifted it again and moved it to the counter in front of the family. The boy stopped spinning for a moment to look at his mother and then at the cashier. The cashier looked at the boy, and when their eyes met, the boy's face was completely open. The blond hair so soft, the eyes a mixture of gray and green, the face unaware of itself. The mother lifted the watermelon and bags of groceries into her shopping cart and the three of them moved toward the door.

The cashier helped an old man with some bread and fruit and then a coworker came to remind him that it was time for his dinner break. That was when he saw the toy lying on the counter where the boy had left it. The cashier untied his apron and rolled it into a ball, picked up the figurine and walked out to the parking lot. The old man was slowly stepping into a brown Buick, and a blue Civic was turning left out of the lot. Too late. The cashier laced his fingers around the arms and legs of the figurine and looked down at it. Boy Robin—that's what his son had carried around with him that last year. He turned to walk back to the store, but then hesitated and turned to watch the Civic. The car was winding its way up the hill, going the back way toward the university. There was no other reason to go that way and no place for a family to live on the university but in the family student apartment complexes. He had gotten to know the town pretty well during the few months he'd been responsible for doing deliveries. He ran for his car at the far end of the lot.

When he turned onto the road that led through the apartments, he looked up the hill and saw the mother and the boy near their car at the top of one of the parking loops. The cashier parked in the closest empty spot, grabbed the toy from the passenger seat, and turned to look out the side window to locate them again. The three were standing at the back of the Civic with the trunk open, the mother standing with her arms folded looking down at something in the trunk of the car and then at her children. The cashier looked at the toy in his hand. How would he explain himself?

The cashier sat in the car and watched the mother bend forward and reach into the trunk of the car. He saw her straighten part way with the watermelon in her arms and then lean forward toward her daughter. She moved as if to place the watermelon in her daughter's arms, but the melon slipped quickly through the girl's arms and to the ground where it immediately began to roll down the hill. The cashier watched as the watermelon rolled down through the parking lot. He looked back at the family and saw them, all three, standing perfectly still watching the melon in its progress down the hill. Their mouths all hung open, their arms hung at their sides.

The watermelon had nearly reached the street when it bounced up over a bump in the asphalt and broke into two pieces. Both halves continued to roll across the street where they then broke into smaller pieces, each veering off in one direction or another and finally stopping. The pieces could never be put back together. The cashier started his car and backed out of the spot. His break would be over in 20 minutes, and he hadn't had any dinner yet. He'd put the toy in the lost and found drawer at the store and try something at the new Chinese place just down the street. The family would come and shop again and then the boy would get his toy back—the boy who was not his. He'd have time to eat if he hurried.

Watermelon

When my daughter was four, she had a tiny high-pitched voice. Her preschool teacher, a woman who wore haram pants and gave all of her parents long, careful looks when they came to pick up their children, called it her “little voice,” and constantly encouraged her to use her “big voice.” I was surprised to hear that she had a big voice. She's nearly 22 years old now and I haven't heard it yet.

The kids and I were shopping at the co-op grocery store that was at the bottom of the hill we lived on in Santa Cruz. Our apartment was actually on the side of the hill that the university sprawls over the top of. I used to run on the university track, and on foggy mornings, I felt that if I stepped off the side of the track, I would land gently in the ocean. It was a beautiful place to live. We had decided to splurge and buy a watermelon that day—a rare treat when our income consisted of student loans and the money my husband made cooking in a restaurant in town. Sierra, her six-year-old brother and I inspected the watermelons in the bin, the kids searching for the biggest one. I thumped a couple, wondering what I was supposed to be listening for, and finally we chose one—a really big one—and moved on to the tofu case. Tofu, if you haven't noticed, is cheap.

Family Student Housing on the UC Santa Cruz campus is a wonderful place to raise children. There is free childcare of the best quality I've ever seen just a four-minute walk from our apartment. There is an extensive playground with two sets of swings and three slides of increasing size and woods that drop down the hill from the playground where the older kids play hide n' seek. The path to Porter College goes through a field where deer routinely graze and huge garter snakes come out of their holes on warm days and lie all over the field like the lazy lengths of muscle they are. Of course, children can only be raised here during the years that at least one parent is attending classes at UC Santa Cruz, and, unfortunately, one cannot afford to do that indefinitely.

The family student housing complex consists of eight or nine parking lots scattered over the the side of the hill with apartments arranged in circles around each parking lot. Our apartment was at the top of one loop. To drive out of our parking lot, you would drive downhill and turn left onto the street that would take you into town. If you were to drive straight downhill instead of turning left, you would enter another parking lot and another loop of apartments.

There was only one negative about living in the UCSC apartments, apart from the deer that wandered the apartment complex after dark. When deer are surprised, say when a person suddenly appears while the deer are winding their way back through the apartments after a visit to the community garden in the center of the complex, they don't run. They stand perfectly, silently still and watch you as you approach. This was how I nearly ran into a buck with huge antlers one evening while carrying an armful of books and thinking about the paper I had to write on Latin American literature. The only negative (and really, how can you call deer wandering silently through your apartment complex in the middle of the night a negative?) was the fact that everything that you or your child accidentally lost hold of while walking from your apartment to the playground or to the laundry room that was even vaguely spherical in shape, or that had wheels attached, would end up outside of the door of the Icelandic couple who lived in the apartment at the end of the loop that was below our loop. One day, I went to pick up my children who were, conveniently, the same age as the Icelandic couple's rosy-cheeked children, and found Ingrid on her doorstep looking at a tricycle that had arrived that afternoon. “I wonder whose this is?” she said cheerfully.

Home from the grocery store, I parked our hatch-back in our spot just outside our apartment and helped my tow-headed children out of their car seats and we all headed for the trunk where the groceries and the watermelon were. “I want to carry the watermelon,” my daughter said in her tiny voice. “Can I carry the watermelon? I want to carry the watermelon.” My daughter was even smaller at four years of age than I was at her age. Her father's people are small and though she and my son were both very healthy and well-fed, they always stood a good head shorter than all of the other children of their age. But I was a parent who believed in allowing children to learn from their own bodies what they could and could not do. When we went to a playground, I was never the mother following her child as he climbed the stairs to the slide, warning him not to jump, not to go down the slide head-first or stop and play half-way down. And so, after opening the trunk and standing and looking back and forth between the watermelon that lay there so large and green and my daughter's small arms, I decided to let her try its weight. Once she discovered how heavy it was, she'd happily release it to me and we'd get on with our day.

I lifted the watermelon and placed it gently into her outstretched arms. The watermelon, of course, slipped through her arms and fell to the ground. And then it rolled. It rolled and it rolled down through our parking lot, over and over, my son and daughter, mouths hanging open, watching it go. It rolled and rolled, endlessly it seemed, until, after bouncing over a small bump in the asphalt, it split open and broke into two pieces that both continued to roll across the street and into the parking lot below ours. The two pieces broke into smaller pieces that rolled off in wide arcs towards one neighbor's apartment or another's until it all finally came to a stop. The three of us stood there, looking. Amazed. We never would have guessed just how far a watermelon could roll.