Unsolicited Advice

“Yeah, I can’t really take credit for any of this,” I say, indicating all of Katie’s sculpture art in the booth, “since my wife makes all of it.”

“You’re a lucky man,” the guy replies.

“You know,” I say, and something in my tone makes him look up at me, so now we’re eye to eye, “the secret to being lucky is knowing that you’re lucky.”

He takes this in, then says, as he walks away, “I’ll keep that in mind."

Little Drunk People

The play date seems to be going well, until the mothers decide it’s time to go. They call their respective toddlers, and while the little girl toddles dutifully back, the little boy, on being called, takes one look over his shoulder at his imploring mother, and then takes off in the opposite direction with a determined waddle.

He’s in no real danger, and he can’t go very fast, but his mother, clearly having gone through this bit a fair number of times, watches him wander like a drunk person over the grass with a resigned look in her eyes.

“Um,” says the other mother tentatively as the boy totters over to a tree and leans on it with both hands like he’s trying to push it over, “have you thought about maybe giving him a bribe?"

Attention Must Be Paid

The three girls get on the train in full voice, joking, talking trash, taking up all the air in the car. The doors shut, and one of them shouts, “What time is it? Showtime!” and her friends laugh, they’re not really doing Showtime, but the rest of the train ignores them, and this simply will not do.

She steps to the aisle, turns to her friend, and as she starts to do a little shuffle, says, “Clap or something, girl."

A Nice Day For a Picnic

A mob of very young school children, thirty or forty at least, herded by a train of attending adults, come into the park while I’m eating lunch. Their semi-tidy line, a convoy of big heads all about the same height on top of small, compact little bodies, collapses into small pods of children as the adults lay out blankets for a picnic on the grass under the trees.

Periodically, one of the children will stand and revolve over to another pod, where he or she will talk to an adult, or to another child in tiny, piping voices that I can’t really hear except as a high countermelody above the burble of noise in the park, and then yet another child will stand and move to yet another pod, like some diagram of an obscure chemical process, ions and protons exchanging their orbits in a lovely, burbling dance.

I watch the groups shift and the adults try to keep track as the children wander here and there, beneath the trees, on the grass, under a blue sky, the bright sun shining down, and a pleasurable pressure builds up just behind my eyes; I take it all in, and sigh.

Helping the Lost

There’s only one turnstile at this subway entrance, and this woman’s inability to figure out how to swipe her MetroCard through the reader has caused a serious line to form behind her.

Finally, the green “Go” sign lights up, but then she pushes the turnstile around without going through it, and everyone in the line groans.

The woman behind her walks her to one side, gently explaining her mistake, and then goes through, seemingly leaving the woman stranded outside the subway.

But then she comes around to the fire exit door, slams her hip into the bar, and lets the woman in with a grim smile, leaving before the woman can thank her.

Witchy

I’m exhausted from a long night and an early morning, sitting at the front desk of the doctor’s office.

“Okay, if you could just fill out these forms, three pages, make sure you fill in every line, sign the third page...,” I say to the patient in front of me, when I sense the woman I work with behind me.

“Hey little boy, want some candy?” she says in a witchy voice, then cackles at her own joke as she puts three small pieces of chocolate next to me.

“You know that got creepy, right?” I interrupt myself to say to her, which brings on another fit of cackling.

Ah, Youth

The two kids behind the counter at the Uhaul are flirting pretty hard, and they don’t care who sees.

When he asks to borrow her scanner to complete my transaction, she hands it to him with a wicked smile and a saucy, “Tap it.”

This gets a big, knowing laugh from him, and then he shakes his head and sings quietly, in a thick Caribbean accent, “Me ‘fraid the pussy bite me.”

Now they’re both laughing, totally in their own world, and I just stand, smiling, pretending I don’t know what’s going on, happy just to see them enjoying themselves, each other, their youth.