“Ya got any BAGS? BIG bags! I’ll buy ’em right now!” The dirty street-looking person who was, apparently, in the market for bags, had slammed open the door to the Taqueria las Americas just moments before, and shoved his way to the front of the line.
The member of the Rodriquez family behind the counter, in whose face the dirty person yelled, was visibly taken aback. “No … all we have are these”, he said as he held up one of the small white bags in which the world’s finest steak burritos leave the taqueria.
“SHIT!”, yelled the dirty person, ignoring the taqueria’s posted admonition to behave and not curse. He then turned and stomped out, mumbling to himself, kicking open the door on his way out, and flicking his cigarette butt on the floor. Everyone in the taqueria, which really is a nice family place where usually everyone does indeed behave themselves, and do not curse, was perfectly still for a moment, surprised and a little bit shocked by what they’d just seen.
All that moved was the smoke coming off the grill, and the festive twinkle of the Christmas lights, which had been hung over the menu board behind the counter.
…
The last night of the semester was cold, and windy. Not the kind of night I generally like to take the train to school, because then I have to stand on two cold, windy outdoor platforms while I wait for the trains to arrive. But I did, ’cause the train gets me there much faster than driving, and I needed every second to finish my hopeless last minute cram for this final.
After the test, which was awful, and which made me feel even worse than I already did about such a wasted semester, and after the first cold, windy platform on the trip back, I stood on the cold, windy platform at the Howard Street station, awaiting the train to Skokie that would take me back to my car. The Howard Street station isn’t what I’d call a particularly pretty place, what with all the graffiti, the steel and concrete of the yard, the dirty old structures, poor lighting, obnoxious billboards, and the trains, all squeaky, and noisy, and dirty, and drab colored, polished aluminum. The Howard Street yard, and the cold, and the wind, weren’t taking my mind off that test and the rest of the hundreds of ways the world has been making me grumpy lately, and I stood there, shivering, waiting for my train, in about as foul a mood as I can ever remember.
The Skokie train pulled in, let off its southbound passengers, and headed down the tracks to the switchover point to where it could switch and come back to the other platform and pick up us northbound riders. As it performed this maneuver, one of the long trains from downtown approached the platform and slowed to a crawl as it came up along the platform where we were standing.
As the lead car grew near, I couldn’t help smiling, and the driver of the train smiled back. He had somehow managed to attach, and then power, a string of small Christmas lights around the inside his driver’s compartment window. Those tiny colored blinking lights illuminated the whole Howard Street yard for me.
…
The old Indian gentleman who runs the Milk Jug convenience store around the corner from my house has apparently had enough of being robbed, and shoplifted, and so on. There’s a new employee at the Jug now, a very large and fierce looking black man whose job seems to consist mainly of standing close to the door looking fierce, with the occasional foray over to the newspapers to straighten up the pile, and the occasional glower at, and admonition to, any neighborhood kid who happens to be misbehaving in the store. “Hey! Y’all quit acting silly, now”.
This guy’s always nice enough, greeting the customers when they come in, but he is very fierce looking, and he never smiles, and he’s always watching your every move, so it’s kind of uncomfortable visiting the Jug these days, even for someone like myself whose last act of shoplifting occurred at the ripe old age of seven. You just feel like a criminal, whether you are, or not.
But I can’t help going there, because it is, after all, just right around the corner. Stopped by there last evening, for example, on my way out for the night, for some small purchase or another, and He was there, looking fierce. I wonder how tough it is on one’s face to look fierce for ten hours straight? So I completed my transaction with the old Indian gentleman, and headed for the door, starting to squeeze my way past the bulk of Him there, feeling vaguely guilty for a crime I knew I had not committed.
He surprised me by reaching out and opening the door for me. I looked up at his face, surprised; this isn’t a service He usually offers. What had I done to get His special attention? But he was smiling broadly, the white of his teeth astonishing in that face that is always so fierce. “Merry Christmas!”, he said.
He didn’t look at all fierce smiling like that.
“Yeah … Merry Christmas to you, too”.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date Written: 07/10/1994