Sunday, November 24, 2024

Read ‘em and sweep

The girl’s face lit up my phone smack-dab in the middle of a random Tuesday.

I didn’t panic. 


I switched my audio to speaker and perched the phone on the edge of a table so I could continue to push a broom with both hands.


I had been doing busy work … pushing dust and debris into little piles around a cement floor as I waited for a technician to arrive, who would tend to the more necessary work of the enterprise. 

She had been texting me with a litany of minor annoyances while I pecked out a word or two between sweeps. 


I understood that she had been struggling with registering for next semester’s classes and that she was taking a break from one of forty-seven thousand other things she does in any given week. She just needed to let off steam.


“Chell-ooooo,” she sang with a relaxed and happy tone, signaling that this rare phone call was more about efficiency than venting end-of-term grievances. “It’s just easier to talk than type,” she said with a labored sigh. All the words she had planned on typing would have cramped her hands if not necessarily her style.  


Of course, I was overjoyed to hear her voice.


She seemed in a good place: excitedly annoyed about the reality of her surroundings and wanting to debrief. There are so many glitches in this eternal matrix of matriculation. She unleashed a torrent of words that, had I been fluent in … *waves hands wildly* …  whatever it is she studies that is well above my Intelligence Quotient.


She is a wonder, and I have no doubt she will figure out the snags in her system.

I thought about the beauty of her enthusiasm as she flitted from topic to topic like a bird gathering seeds.


“Oh hey, check your phone. I’m sending you a picture.”


It’s a snowflake. The kind that’s folded and cut out of simple office paper. It is hanging from some artificial greenery with a loop of white curling ribbon. 


“What is that?” I ask, ready for the most obvious answer to be her response. “A snowflake, you dork.”


She is still able to translate Mom pretty fluently.


“Work has an angel tree. I always had so much fun when we’d pick them off the tree at school.”

She picked someone she understood completely: A teenage girl who needed a hat and gloves but wanted make-up and the funds necessary to shop for herself.


“The saddest things I think I ever saw were the gifts we volunteered to wrap from the well-meaning folks who donated to church fund drives. Regifted cosmetic sets with little-girl colors or dried-up old nail polish testers. The add-ons or freebies, that are only meant to entice consumers to upgrade their purchases. Nothing would have been better.”


So she is spending her lunch hour and part of her savings to build a care package out of the things that are rarely discounted. Perhaps it’s just stuff, but it’s also a welcome distraction while she’s waiting for her tech support to arrive.

 


No comments: