My dear husband thinks I walk to town more often now that the new frozen yogurt joint is open. He’s probably correct, I do love me that Goberry. And that was my destination yesterday evening when he’d taken the kids to a pickle-making laboratory that was dubbed by my kids at least the Picklefest at our friends’ house (incidentally, twelve year-old son just started a very wonderful camp run by the dad, Our Place: in a nutshell, hiking and writing and studying place).
It’s a totally rare event for me to be alone after dark (in the house or out of the house). The night was cool (especially for this unbelievably steamy July). I was sweaty, having just worked out. I did what I generally do not do and left my workout clothes on (a kind of unlikely and silly look, short workout pants plus heeled-in clogs, but hey), tossing a sweatshirt over my sweaty ensemble. I chatted with my mother on the way downtown, also a rare treat in the evening.
Town itself was kind of hopping, not busy weekend full yet for after nine on a Monday, pretty many people were taking advantage of the fact that it was such a lovely evening.
I walked up behind a young man, who seemed to be propping an old woman up and not so much walking as careening, but very slowly, down the sidewalk. They’d gone just a few steps when the woman collapsed. Rather than falling, her tumble toward the ground resembled a gentle landing thanks to the young man who made the incident appear as if she were merely crumbling in that direction. She was too large for crumbling to be the right word, though; she appeared in her sixties or seventies (more like seventies, but it wasn’t clear where she’d been living so it also seemed as if her life could have accelerated her aging). In short order, he laid her down and then got her back to a stooped-over seated position on the sidewalk. I stopped and as soon as I observed that neither he nor two onlookers had yet dialed 9-1-1, I announced that I was calling. It was immediately clear that the woman was not getting up on her own steam.
The young man said he had to get to work. I had him wait until the call was complete, in case there were questions he needed to answer. Then, I said, Go, I’ll wait till the ambulance arrives. Turns out, even before the ambulance made it the police officer did and we shared the same information with him as with the dispatcher. She was able to tell the police officer her first name, Doris. Her legs appeared to be quite swollen, as if they were more logs than branches. One other man, sporting a pair of band-aids across his nose as if he’d had them crisscrossed after a hard blow to it, had knelt right down, his voice just slightly slurred, and asked her questions like what day it was and how many fingers was he holding up. I couldn’t decide if he’d watched a lot of television or had been similarly on the ground himself before, semi-lucid at best.
Leaving the woman behind as the ambulance lights approached, the man and I started down the sidewalk together, him saying, “That was scary. Wait a few years, it could be any of us.” That’s why we stop to help, I added, because someone, you hope, will help us if we needed help. He agreed, shaking his head. I’d reached frozen yogurt Mecca, bright lights, friends inside and I told the kid-and-young-teen friends the story and they scampered off from mothers and a grandmother to see the ambulance loading in the collapsed woman.
Earlier in the day, I’d been reading an op-ed about the new anti-bullying laws in Massachusetts, and essentially, the writers were advocating that ending bullying is all about building community and helping kids to do that well, to learn how to care for and about one another. It’s a compelling piece, and I share this pertinent quote about what schools can do:” Most important, educators need to make a profound commitment to turn schools into genuine communities. Children need to know that adults consider kindness and collaboration to be every bit as important as algebra and reading. In groups and one-on-one sessions, students and teachers should be having conversations about relationships every day. And, as obvious as it might sound, teachers can’t just preach kindness; they need to actually be nice to one another and to their students.”
You could say my friends’ kids were gawkers. I think of it differently. They heard about this in the context of their mothers’ friend helped this woman. Then, of course, curiosity was added into the mix. They watched her be loaded on and driven off. Whatever her circumstances, that evening she had champions, collected on a downtown sidewalk.
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Oh, when I kind of took charge there, being the one to call for help, I felt every bit the middle-aged lady seizing responsibility from the twentysomethings first on the scene (that I might add) and being the one willing to wait in a most fortysomething mom-of-four way (because that’s the kind of break from kids mothers get, right?).
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Frozen yogurt in hand, I meandered back up the street, crossing over again at City Hall because some kickass musicians were playing on the steps, guitar, bass, fiddle and banjo (not a typical off-key panhandler or even a talented teen). How gorgeous to live under an almost full moon in a pretty town with a castle-like municipal building, kind strangers, good friends, delicious frozen yogurt and a sense that plenty more summer is left. The musicians were playing Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which couldn’t have been more fitting had I tried to dream it up.
