Ten-Finger Exercises

Interference

It happened as I was driving home. School had just let out, and as I came to the top of the hill I saw a boy about ten years old kicking a smaller boy who lay on the sidewalk. Enraged, I pulled the car over to the curb and struggled to put down the window. I had been driving my husband’s car for the past week, and his window buttons operated exactly opposite from mine. In my state of agitation, I couldn’t seem to get the window down, and so when the kicker started toward me, I laid on the horn.

“Whatsa matter?” he demanded.

Finally I found the right button, pushed it the right direction, and the passenger window went down. “Stop kicking him!” I yelled.

“We’re just playing around,”the boy said.

“Don’t kick!” I said loudly, not knowing what to do next.

“We were just playing around,” he said again. “Ask him yourself.”

The smaller boy, probably the same age but Hispanic, was on his feet by now. Looking me straight in the eye, he said the same thing.

“Well, don’t kick people,” I said lamely and pulled out from the curb and drove away, thankful that my own children were not around. They would have been mortified.

Angry with myself for being so easily shaken, I went over the scene in my mind. Why had I done that? Should I have ignored it? It hadn’t really looked as if the boy was being hurt, but I didn’t notice that at first. And what if he had been? What would I have done then? I felt old and helpless, but not in the wrong. It seemed like the right thing to do, to try to intervene.

The smaller boy appeared to be telling the truth, but what if he had to say that around that bully? That thought crossed my mind, and I was puzzling about it when, out of nowhere…

The last sentence didn’t really happen, but the rest did. When I was replaying it in my mind as I drove away, I thought about possible things that could have happened, including my own inattention as I drove causing a terrible accident. I started to write it as a story, in third person, but decided I didn’t know how to express the sudden calamity of hitting a child with my car. I may play around with it again at another time, because it could be a good story.