Almost as soon as our feet touched ground level, a woman spun around and pointed an accusatory finger at my mother. "You!" she hissed, like something out of a blockbuster. "You said you were trying to leave, but you just wanted a better seat!" My mother tells me that this woman proceeded to curse her out, but I found the episode too traumatic and managed to block it out of my memory completely. That can happen sometimes, when we force ourselves to forget an experience and it becomes almost like it never happened.
After only a few minutes, I could not breathe. I was a seven-year-old among adults; they were feet taller than me and sucking in all of the air. Looking up was like looking through a small tube, and whenever oxygen tried to reach me, it was taken in by the tube itself. "I can't breathe," I found the strength to rasp to my mother, who summoned her own strength and lifted me up from the waist, propping me on her hip. Cold, sweaty air reached my lips and I gladly accepted it. After a while, however, I became too heavy on her legs with just one arm around my torso, so she was forced to throw the quickly wilting bouquet we had bought for the party into the trench behind us.
Out of nowhere, my mother felt a tap on the shoulder and spun around. I was crying. "Do you want to get out?" said a man a little shorter than her, with long, brown hair. It struck me that he had a faint resemblance to some interpretations of Jesus.
"Yes, yes we want to get out!" weeped my mom, exhausted and defeated.
"I will get you out," said Jesus, and he raised a fist in the air and began to shout: "There's a child who fainted! THERE'S A CHILD WHO FAINTED!" The crowd, once uncrackable, melted in our hands and parted, leaving a passageway about two feet wide, straight up to the barricade.
As we hurried up, I whispered, "Momma, I didn't -" but she quickly shushed me and kept running forward. We reached the gate and found a police officer, dressed in navy blue and a gun. This could get a bit complicated in someone else's hands, but Jesus knew what to do.
"There's a child who fainted, ma'am," he said urgently.
She pointed uptown. "A few blocks, there's a truck. you can get out." Before I knew what was happening, the barricade was open and we were in the parade. We could see all of the floats, top to bottom! We could experience the roar of the crowd! Sure, we were going in the opposite direction from the marching band that was just passing, but does that really matter when you've just gotten out of suffocation and into a spotlight?
Meanwhile, our followers - remember our followers? - said, "We're with them!" frantically and chased us into the parade, but this time, accompanied by tourists. I guess they figured that it was worth it to miss the rest of the show in order to get a few pictures in the parade for the refrigerator. They snapped their Blackberry cameras like lightning, but in the moment, we forgot to snap pics. There was only one thing on our mind: seltzer. As soon as we saw the TV truck, we dashed out into the empty street and put our hands on our knees, panting.
Up along side us came the couple from the trench, grinning and coughing and crying at once, like the rest of us. We nodded at them, and them at us, to mark this memory we would never forget. Into a convenience store - I got black cherry seltzer, Schweppes if you must know - and then onto the subway, we didn't talk. Once we had taken the safe train all the way back to our home borough, I realized that we had never thanked Jesus. I don't know why I started calling him that; I'm not Christian, and don't know the story of the Old or New Testament, but he did seem to be our savior. Leaving him was a regret, sure, but I never forgot him. I'll seem him again, someday, I hope, and I'll track him down and thank him . . . perhaps in Central Park.
No comments:
Post a Comment