die for the lack of listenin’ ears. Granny T is right.
There must be other people around here with stories no one’s listening to. Real stories that might teach the same lessons I was hoping to bring out in literature. What if I could make them part of my curriculum, somehow? Maybe they could help me understand this place and my students. Maybe they could help my students understand each other.
I’m so busy walking and thinking, scheming and planning and crafting positive visualizations of how to make next week different from last week, that when I come out of my imaginary world into the real one again, the tree tunnel around the road is gone and I’m walking past an enormous farm field. I have no idea how far I’ve hiked. My mind hasn’t registered a thing.
On either side of the raised lane, neatly planted rows of what looks like spiky grass stand half submerged in water. The sunshine is gone, and the vibrant green seems startlingly bright against the cloudy day—as if I’m looking at it on a TV set and a two-year-old has been playing with the color knob.
I realize now what has stopped me in my tracks and awakened me. Two things, rather. One, I’ve apparently walked right past the judge’s place without noticing, because if I continue beyond this field, I’ll be in the fringes of town. Two, I can’t continue on at the moment. A log is blocking the trail ahead…only it’s not a log. It’s an alligator. Not a huge alligator, but big enough that it’s just sitting there, rather fearlessly sizing me up.
I fasten my gaze upon it, awed and horrified. It’s the largest predator I’ve ever seen outside a TV screen.
“I move him for ya!” It’s then that I notice, in the periphery, the little boy with the bicycle. His dirty shirt bears the evidence of the chicken leg spirited away from the Cluck and Oink earlier.
“No. No-no-no!” But my words have zero effect. The kid makes a run at the gator, pushing his bike like a ramrod.
“Stop! Get back!” I rush forward, with no idea what I plan to do.
Fortunately, the alligator is off-put by the brouhaha. It slinks down the side of the lane into the watery field below.
“You shouldn’t do that!” I gasp. “Those are dangerous.”
The kid blinks, murky light accentuating bewildered wrinkles in his forehead. Wide brown eyes regard me from beneath the impossibly thick lashes I noticed the first day I saw him sitting alone in the empty schoolyard.
“Him’s not a very big’un,” he says of the alligator.
My heart squeezes. His voice and the slight speech difficulty make him seem even younger than he probably is. Regardless, I don’t think a five-or-six-year-old should be wandering all over town like this. Crossing streets and chasing alligators. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
His bony shoulders rise, then fall under the lopsided straps of a faded, grease-striped Spider-Man muscle shirt. That plus the baggy shorts are really a pair of pajamas.
I shake the tension from my hands, try to get my wits about me. The leftover buzz of fear has me still prepared to do battle.
Leaning in, I go for eye contact. “What’s your name? Do you live around here?”
He nods.
“Are you lost?”
He shakes his head.
“Do you need help?”
Another nonverbal no.
“All right then, I want you to look at me now.” He flutters a glance up, then away again. I do the teacher thing with two fingers to my eyeballs, then pointed toward his. We’re locked in. “You know how to get home from here?”
His gaze holds fast to mine, his head moving uncertainly up and down. He’s like a stray kitten in a corner, trying to figure out what he has to do to get away from me.
“Is it very far?”
He points vaguely toward the ramshackle cluster of houses on the other side of the field. “I want you to get on your bike and go right there. And stay there, because there’s a storm