Out Among Humans

She was nice enough but of course teachers can turn on you at any moment.He was sure he was in trouble. Why else would a teacher make you stay after school?

She had taught him in the first grade and now again in the second.

She had her class read out loud everyday and he had trouble following along. He watched the other kids turn pages hoping the pictures would give him a clue. When it was his turn, they had to show him where to pick up.

When they met after school, the good sister took him to a closet-sized room nobody ever used. He was terrified about what was going to happen. She showed him a hand-printed word, she underlined its suffix and told him it is pronounced “shun.”

Say it out loud. Ten times. Now remember it.

She explained that ‘do’ is ‘du’ (except when it isn’t) and ‘ph’ is ‘f’ and that ‘ed’ changes at the end of some verbs.

They would meet every Tuesday and Thursday and nobody would find out. He squirmed when she promised he was going to be one of her best readers — only girls were supposed to be the best readers.

She used marks to break down sentences and to show who was doing what to whom. She dared him to diagram a compound sentence on his own.

When summer came along he began to read his brothers’ comic books. It took an hour to work through just one story. But with the help of Scrooge McDuck he unlocked the secrets of apostrophes and contractions. That was big.

So yeah, a nun and a duck.

The boy had a new teacher in the fall, one who wore clothes that showed her arms and legs and her pretty hair. MIss Anne pulled him aside at the end their first week to tell him how impressed she was with the way he read.

That was the first year he didn’t hate being in school.

Much to her surprise the first few lines took her breath away.A woman not so different from the rest of us sat in her living room watching a town-hall debate between Senate candidates.

During opening remarks, one of them pulled a copy the Constitution out of his pocket and held it up to the camera.

“I’m the Constitution candidate,” he explained proudly.

He said his policies were exactly what the Framers had in mind, one-hundred percent. He would defend each of the articles and all of the amendments. “God bless the Constitution of the United States of America and my opponent is an idiot.” he concluded.

Then it was the other candidate’s turn.

She whipped out her own pocket-sized Constitution. She could recite it by heart if you wanted her to, she said. She explained that her opponent posed a serious threat to the freedoms we enjoy and that his ideas would make James Madison roll over in his grave.

As the woman watched the two argue back and forth, she wondered how politicians wearing the same flag pins, reading the same Constitution, could disagree on the basics of our democracy. It occurred to her that they might be twisting things around just to get votes. She sometimes watched pro wrestling, maybe it was like that.

The woman decided to check out the Constitution for herself. She downloaded it and started in at the beginning, with the Preamble. Much to her surprise the first few lines took her breath away.

She yelled upstairs to tell her husband Clive she was doing something, and would he mind going out to eat later than usual? Clive yelled back that he had had a late lunch and he didn’t mind at all.

The Zip Dip sits by a river that throws its humidity miles around. It gets hot in August and things can go wrong.

The young girl who was just beginning school and did everything asked of her, had more than earned the coins she clutched in her hand. She and her mother, who stayed in the car, had rehearsed how to order her first hot-fudge sundae.

Waiting on the other side of the sliding window was a 16-year-old soda jerk with only a few hours of training under his belt.

The couple who owned the Zip Dip, Florence and Tom, had a second-hand, soft-serve unit that didn’t extrude in easy ripples the way Dairy Queen machines did. It pushed out awkward pegs shaped like sticks of butter.

One day Florence excused herself momentarily — and that was precisely when the little girl came to the window. The rookie faced child alone.

“May I please have a hot fudge sundae?” she asked, exactly as she had been taught.

“Maybe you’d rather have a nice cone instead?” the boy suggested nervously.

“With whipped cream,” she added.

“All the big kids like cones lots better.” he said.

“And a cherry…,” she continued.

“That would cost…”

She stopped him cold. “They promised me a sundae.”

The content and temperature of the creamy whip mix were perfect but bending those sharp corners into graceful swirls was beyond the young man. He tried to cover his failure with extra whipped cream.

There are moral, ethical and legal responsibilities that goes with being a soda jerk but he pushed the concoction across the counter anyway. When the sundae shifted and fell in on itself, the girl filled her lungs and let out a feral scream.

Florence scraped the toppings away and threw the ice cream back into the extruding machine. That would be their secret, she told the young man.

The girl’s mother managed to talk her down as they sat in the car. The child didn’t fall prey to shoplifting or eating disorders as might have been expected.

As for the boy, he learned a lesson that would serve him for the rest of his life. He learned that he didn’t have a knack for doing things, which isn’t a bad thing to know.

After closing the Zip Dip for the season, Florence and Tom spent their winter in Hialeah as they always did, relaxing in the sun and playing the ponies.

The vision in
his right eye gave out on a Friday afternoon, just like that. There was no warning.

It was an immediate loss.

He looked in the mirror but he didn’t see anything unusual. His ophthalmologist had mentioned he would need cataract work one day but it would be safe and routine and Steve shouldn’t worry.

He read using one eye before going to sleep that night, hoping his sight would be normal in the morning. It wasn’t.

Someone knew of an ophthalmologist who sees patients on Saturdays. It was brutally hot and many patients had cancelled, there would be an opening that same afternoon.

The ophthalmologist pressured Steve to go “immediately” to a far suburb to see a retina guy he knew but didn’t bother to explain why.

The idea of spending a Saturday afternoon in a cab wasn’t at all appealing so he signed into an emergency room instead. They told him that yes, he needed to get out to that retina specialist as quickly as possible.

Steve worried he had he squandered a critical hour.

The retina surgeon used a scarring technique known as “cryo” to staunch the spread of sub-retinal fluid. It was successful. But no guarantees.

Getting home was a nightmare. Storm-flooded arterials and seasonal construction were everywhere. A cabbie tried to refuse the long, difficult fare.

Steve didn’t read that night. He had been ordered to avoid the printed word. Nothing could be more painful for a man who has led book discussions for years and who devours the Times crossword puzzle every Sunday.

Steve’s body has been unusually resilient over his seventy-six years. Doctors say it may heal itself again. There’s nothing to do now but to wait, and to see.