From Gene’s Notebook

…I saw two young people recently ….

She was on a downtown porch and not pleased to be there; you’ve seen it. The family had pulled up to visit the wheelchair-bound, frail and shriveled grandmother. The mother, father and three children stepped out of the SUV, and walked up to the porch, where the father, the old woman’s son, bent close to hear some muffled words; the daughter-in-law ushered the two little children closer to the wheelchair and they did as beckoned. But the teenager stood at the rear of her family and grandmother, sometimes looking at the weekly Sunday visit, and more often turning and looking at the SUV, wanting to go; she took several steps back from the porch and onto the sidewalk, and started to punch numbers on her cellphone, but before she started to speak, her mother had grabbed her arm and pulled it with the cellphone still in hand away from her daughter’s face ….

He was slouched in his car. He leaned back, moved his leg to the dashboard, pulled up a pants leg and showed me his ankle-bracelet. “Next time, 20 to life!” he said. Then, he pulled down his pants leg and got his leg off the dash. How long ago had it been when he was the best writer and reader in middle school? How long ago had it been when he said to me, when we were walking back from Mexico, “Never thought about it before what we saw in Mexico,” referring to a train and bus trip to Reynosa and back? His cell went off. “Work. I’ve got a
trade, AC repair, and that’s my boss. Later,” and he drove off ….

Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky