What On Earth Have I Done? Read online

  “What’s wrong with you two?” she asked.

  “Her husband was hit by a truck,” I moaned, “and we don’t even know where he is or who’s taking care of him.”

  “What?”

  Somewhere out there in the world is a young man.

  Him. The One Who. Mr. Someday. I have a message for him:

  You don’t know it, but something lovely will happen to you someday, whatever may be happening to you now. My dear friend, Brie, is on the way to you. Someday. When she gets there, you’ll never be sad and lonely again.

  When you meet her, she will be dressed up, looking good, and laughing. And if you are very, very lucky, she not only will become your wife, she will become your best friend. In the meantime, she and I think about you and worry about you. Please take care of yourself.

  Watch out for trucks.

  _________

  Underneath this story is the question I often ask myself:

  “What will become of me?”

  Somebody once asked me: “If you could know everything that will ever happen to you for the rest of your life, but you could not change a thing, would you want to know?”

  Some days, yes. Mostly, no.

  But I can’t stop wondering, even if it makes no sense. Even if I don’t really believe in Destiny or the One and Only. I wonder . . .

  Meanwhile, the trucks of fate roll by.

  The trick is to not get run over by one.

  The trick is to be there, alert, by the side of the road, with your thumb out. So that if the truck with your number on it just happens to come along, you will know. And you will get in and go. And the ride will be as long and as lovely as you always imagined it might be.

  11

  Summer’s End

  Three tousle-haired and barefooted kids in the nine-or-ten-year-old class smile and wave from behind their lemonade stand on a corner not far from my house. They’re very proud of their stand and especially their big sign:

  FRESH COLD LEMONADE 25 CENTS.

  Every word is spelled correctly and printed neatly. Being a sucker for lemonade stands, I stopped to sample their wares, and complimented them on the sign. “Well, we go to school, you know,” said one, somewhat indignant that I would infer a lack of language skills.

  They’re doing a booming business, despite the fact that their lemonade is a bit sour. Part of their success is due to their father, supervising in a lawn chair from the shade of a tree several yards behind them. He has what looks like a small plastic water bottle in his hand. Checking to see if the coast is clear, he points to the bottle and flashes a large grin and a small sign at me. “Shot of vodka, $1.00.”

  Merchandizing is a subtle art.

  On my way home from the lemonade stand I noted the traffic islands.

  The city of Seattle has installed these round impediments in the middle of residential streets to slow drivers and keep neighborhoods from becoming alternate arterials to nearby road-rage routes. A few islands are dry and weedy and ugly by summer’s end, but some have been turned into tiny botanical gardens by the people who live nearby.

  I saw a lady directing traffic around the other side of an island while a man watered the plants from a hose connected to a hydrant at his house way across the street on the corner. The island has blue hydrangeas and orange nasturtiums and some tall, almost black African grasses.

  The island itself doesn’t slow the traffic. The beauty in it does.

  Another island has two well-watered apple trees planted on it. The apples are greening into redness. A gray-haired woman in a pale blue apron was checking the trees for insects and polishing the apples with a white dishcloth.

  A block away is an island with several varieties of blue and purple and white lavender completely covering it. I can smell the perfume from across the street. Two children were carefully cutting stalks of lavender and putting them in a vase.

  These islands are public property, belonging to none, available to all. Why bother to care for them? It seems that some people think that the administrative staff of the city of Seattle is not limited to the professionals who work in city office buildings downtown.

  Some people think that those who maintain the streets for the city of Seattle are not just those who are paid to drive around in uniforms in official trucks with official equipment.

  Like the girls on the school safety patrol, the island-keepers have a larger view of what it means to take care of their corner of the world. I stopped to thank one of the island-keepers and admire the roses she grows in the public parking strip in front of her house.

  A day later a bouquet of those roses appeared on my front porch.

  _________

  I write this on Labor Day weekend. How I hate it that summer is ending. Next week the rains will begin and most everybody moves their part of the street theater inside. The lemonade stand will be closed and the children back in school. And walking around in my neighborhood in the rain will be a lonely affair.

  I will miss being so easily part of the community that summer provides. I will miss the many opportunities for the delight in what Thornton Wilder wrote about in his great play, Our Town.

  He said the play was “. . . an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”

  12

  Cursed

  A pair of black soccer shoes dangled from a power line way up in the air out in the middle of Bigelow Street near my house. I know how they got there because I was a witness.

  Rained this morning. I was out walking in the late afternoon. Ahead of me by a block were four grade-school kids. Three sizes of boys and a gangly girl already taller than her mates. They were outfitted in team uniforms, headed home after practice. Three had their soccer shoes over their shoulders, tied together by the laces. One kid swung his shoes around and around and threw them up in the air. When they came down, he threw them up again. And again. Higher. Until they hit the power line and wrapped themselves around the line.

  “OH-MY-GOD!” said one, clearly awed by the accomplishment.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” said another.

  The group stood and stared at the soccer shoes swaying gently above them. Then awe shifted to fear.

  “Mother is going to kill you when she finds out,” said the girl.

  “His dad is going to beat the hell out of him,” said another.

  Everything must have looked so fine to Billy this afternoon. Fall. A new season. Hope for a championship and a trophy. New uniforms, new shoes, good practice, and school still a week away.

  Now this. Death by Mother, beating by Father, banishment to his room, and no new shoes. He can hear it now:

  “We are not going to buy you more shoes.”

  “Let that be a lesson to you. Don’t do stupid things.” And no shoes means not playing on the team. And not playing on the team means humiliation. There will be all the “Ya-ya-ya-ya—Billy hung his shoes on a power line.” Nothing like beginning a new school year and a new season as a loser.

  Cursed.

  Billy is desperate. “Don’t tell. Promise.”

  “But that won’t get your shoes back. And you’ll have to lie.”

  “We could put a sharp knife on a long stick and cut them down.”

  “All we need is a big long ladder.”

  “It’s a power line—we could get killed.”

  And so on, and so on and so on after that.

  And then the Big Brilliant Idea strikes—an epiphany: Call 911.

  This is an emergency situation, surely.

  And those fire guys have big ladders and they get cats down all the time and they wouldn’t want kids to mess with power lines and so maybe if they call 911 and tell their story the fire guys would come and meanwhile they could hide in the bushes and the fire guys would get the shoes down and just leave them on the sidewalk or something and nobody would ever know. Brilliant!

  The girl got out her cell phone.

  Sounded like a plan to me, b
ut I didn’t want to be included in it. I turned around and walked home. And I don’t know exactly what happened, though I did hear a siren wailing after a while.

  Probably wasn’t the fire guys. More likely an ambulance carrying Billy’s remains away after his father beat the hell out of him and his mother killed him and he died in humiliation and shame because he is such an idiot and a loser.

  You know his sister didn’t call 911.

  Of course not.

  She called her mom, who is, you will recall, Billy’s mom as well.

  And there went the season.

  So young to have to bear a sports curse.

  He’ll never live it down.

  Years and years and years from now, at every family gathering:

  “Remember the time Billy hung his soccer shoes on the power line?”

  “And tried to get me to call 911.”

  “Well, it might’ve worked.”

  “Right, Billy. Still an idiot.”

  Cursed.

  13

  Back and Forth and Back . . .

  After a week of rain the skies cleared and the temperature warmed up, promising a spell of Indian Summer. Out walking, I stopped by the neighborhood playground where the best swings are. In summer, early and late, I usually have the swings all to myself, and I often sit and swing for a while. And so I have done this evening.

  But I was not alone. Children were allowed back outside after supper to play in the fading light, and the playground rapidly filled up. Soon, all of the swings were occupied. A little boy marched up to stand in front of me.

  He stared at me for a bit, and then said:

  “I want to swing. You’re not a kid.”

  “Yes, I am,” I replied.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “NO, YOU’RE NOT!” the kid shouted.

  His father got up off a bench and walked over to see why his son is shouting at the white-bearded man on the swing. Trouble.

  “What’s wrong, Billy?”

  “He won’t let me swing. He says he’s a kid.”

  The father considered me.

  I, still swinging, considered the father.

  The father smiled. Then laughed. Then turned to his son.

  “He is a kid,” the father explained. “Just a big old one.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  The father took the son by the hand.

  “You can wait your turn. Come teeter-totter with me.”

  And they did that.

  It will be a long, long time before the kid is old enough to understand. Someday when he is a big old kid I wish for him the small joy of sitting in a swing in the soft September twilight. May he remember the example his father and I have set. And keep on swinging—back and forth and back and forth . . .

  14

  Used Feet

  “Would you like to use my feet? My shoes are twelve inches long.”

  An offer I made to three girls across the street from me who were absorbed in measuring the distance from a sign to a parked truck. The girls were fifth graders—safety patrol members in charge of the elementary school crosswalk at the corner nearest my house.

  “Yes,” they shouted in chorus, and one of them raised her red STOP flag and escorted me safely over to the scene of a possible crime.

  Here’s the situation: A sign on a tall post on the corner says: NO PARKING WITHIN 30 FEET. A pickup truck with a construction company’s logo on it is parked closer than the girls think it should be. The girls are empowered to report the license numbers of any vehicles breaking the law while they are on duty—usually those driving too fast or not stopping for children. It’s been a slow morning, and the only opportunity for the girls to exercise their authority is this parked truck. And it is not an incidental issue. The truck does ever so slightly block their view of oncoming traffic.

  What to do?

  So I carefully walked the curb, foot-in-front-of-foot, from sign to pickup, and sure enough, the truck is twenty-seven feet away from the sign. Aha! Busted! One girl, the sergeant in charge, has her pad and pencil at the ready. Wait—not so fast—the girls are not in agreement.

  What will happen to the guy if they turn him in? Will he be arrested and taken to jail? Is three feet over the line really such a crime? Does “thirty feet” mean exactly thirty feet or “somewhere around” thirty feet?

  And there may be mitigating circumstances. “My mom does this all the time.” “Maybe he’s somebody’s dad.” “Maybe he’ll be right back and we can talk to him.” “Yeah, maybe just warn him about not doing it again.”

  “But the law is the law, and he’s broken the law.” “Yeah, but only by three feet.” “Besides, it’s almost time to go to class—maybe he’ll be gone when we come back.” “Does it really matter?”

  They did not ask my advice. And I didn’t want them to ask. On their own they were sorting out elementary issues of human community. That’s why they are in elementary school. Underneath the specific issue lay the fundamental ones: What is right? What is wrong? What is the law? What is justice? And what part should mercy play in figuring the equation?

  They were not leaving until they decided what to do.

  But I quietly went my way—out of sight and, I hope, out of mind.

  They were doing just fine by themselves. They didn’t need me, only my big feet. And only then because they wanted to establish some objective facts. Good on them.

  What did they decide? I don’t know. They and the truck were gone when I came back. But I do know that how they were deciding was admirable—using their minds to figure out the right thing to do. They could have ignored the infraction and gone to class. But they knew their job and accepted the responsibility. I went on home feeling that their corner of the world was in very good hands.

  All too soon they will confront conflicts around drug and alcohol use, sexual experience, women’s health rights, and political leadership. I trust they will continue to do what they did this morning—get the facts and use their minds in a collaborative way in the name of justice. Make a judgment and act on it—knowing that it’s never simple or easy.

  If I could have said anything to them I would have pointed out that they, like the driver of the truck, were in the construction business—responsible for building and maintaining a just world, one small decision at a time. Taking good care of their corner.

  And as to their question: “Does it matter?’

  Yes, it matters a great deal.

  15

  Cheese Head Rules

  Most men don’t shop. They re-supply. They know what they need. They know exactly where it is—which store and which shelf—and they go in and get it and leave. No fooling around in the aisles. In—buy—out. That’s it.

  I am of these men.

  The next morning, after aiding the safety patrol, I was on my way downtown. Need new socks. Twelve pairs—six black and six brown. Know exactly where they are. Annual trip to the men’s shop in Nordstrom’s emporium. Same as last year and the year before that.

  Park. Move out. Street corner. Red light. No traffic coming in any direction that way or that way. No cops. Single-minded men on a sock resupply mission are exempt from stoplight rules. Red lights are for the children and old ladies. Go.

  Five hurried steps into the street I notice a family standing on the curb opposite me. All four are wearing green T-shirts saying “CHEESE HEAD FROM WISCONSIN” in big white letters. Tourists from a state that has turned a pejorative nickname into a badge of pride—meaning good-humored solid citizens: conservative, hard working, law abiding, and proud of it.

  The two girls and the mom and dad are holding hands while patiently waiting for the light to change. The two little girls—maybe nine and eleven years old—are staring at me.

  Or rather they are staring at a mature adult male citizen blatantly crossing the street against a red light. They are probably Safety Patrol members—sisters-in-arms of those three girls I had praised yesterday
for taking care of their corner of the world.

  Time stood still. The light stayed red. The girls were now pointing at me. The warning alarm in my head went off: BEEP, BEEP, BEEP! My conscience starts muttering, “Hypocrite, phony, charlatan.” Now the parents are staring at me.

  I am hating every moment of this situation.

  Sigh. I stop. Turn around. Retreat to the curb. And wait.

  The light finally changes to green. The family from Wisconsin and I begin crossing. And just as they pass me, the oldest girl flashes a fine grin in my direction and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

  A gesture of mercy on a penitent.

  _______

  We watch each other, you know. And often watch out for each other as well. I do not know the names of those girls or where they are now, and they may never know that I am telling you this story, but they were watching out for me and you and us.

  Later, mission accomplished, I walked more thoughtfully back to my car. The red light event troubled me. I recalled the eighteenth-century French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In a philosophy class in college, I was exposed to his notion of the Social Contract. Most simply stated this is the implied agreement we make to live together in an orderly society. Without a covenant to abide by fundamental standards, anarchy results.

  We codify these agreements into laws, but the laws depend on an attitude about the nature of community. That attitude is always on public display in respecting the simplest rules. For example, “Except for emergency vehicles, a red light means STOP. Always. For everybody. Period.”

  Elemental.

  Why is it that I sometimes act like that rule doesn’t apply to me?

  The Mother Question echoes: “Who do you think you are?”

  Answer: A cheese head. But not the kind from Wisconsin.

  16

  First Grade and a Trilobite

  Full Harvest Moon last night. If my feeble math skills serve me half well, I might have seen the moonrise about eight hundred times in my life, though I probably missed half of them because of weather or because I was too young to know what was going on. And I may have seen as many as thirty Harvest Moons. More than ever, as I age, I try to be there for the lovely moments, like the rising of the moon in the fall of the year.