Pick Up the Cone
A small moment I think about a lot
Image by memyselfandeye from Pixabay
I called Oklahoma City home for three years when I took a management job at regional third-party logistics company – that’s fancy talk for we delivered for other people. My boss was an ex-combat marine named Richard. He was the kind of guy who looked thirty as he approached fifty but who’s insides were a couple decades older than that.
He managed a third of the company, and the OKC office was the newest, having been established only a month prior to my hire. How perfect! I also was new, having never managed anything besides maybe my younger brother once.
Fast, fast, fast. Now, now, now. That was the game I played while I lived in America’s belt buckle. Maybe that’s why one story sticks out among the rest of the scenery. Not a big moment, nothing to do with deliveries or customers or contractors at all. The moment was small and orange.
Richard and I were driving back to the office from some meeting or another. Hell, maybe not a meeting at all, maybe we’d just completed a delivery because we were shorthanded and there was an emergency, like I said – this memory isn’t about work.
I was piloting the car into the parking lot of our office building. As I navigated around a caution cone that’d fallen into the street, Richard ordered me to stop.
He got out of the car and moved the cone.
That was the moment. Part of me thought it was silly, part of me thought it was beautiful, but something clicked in me right then, sending me to another memory. Suddenly, I was staring at a row of orange cones lining a construction area on Mass Ave in Washington D.C.
It was the summer between my junior and senior year at American University. The bus came huffing to a stop. I snugged the worn blue backpack I’d had since high school tighter and boarded.
Grey clouds covered the sky. That didn’t bode well for my tips tonight. I worked as a back waiter at a restaurant on the Georgetown waterfront. It was one of the better job’s I’d held: decent pay in cash each night, straight forward work, tasty snacks, and the workout it gave me left me able to run three miles up hill – a task I can no longer claim (time is a cruel mistress).
The back seat of the bus is the ideal place to make the journey. With headphones in, I could stare out the rear window so long as the bus wasn’t packed, melting the world around me into a pleasant burble. I watched embassies turn into historic residences as rain began to streak the glass.
We stopped. The door opened, then the mobility ramp’s whirring broke through my music. A woman in a motorized wheelchair boarded the bus, her thin, bare arms streaked in dripping water.
I knew what I should do. Offer the uniform. The shirt and pants I had in my bag cost, what, $50? Those few steps to the front of the bus may as well have been the Atacama for how my brain processed it.
I stared for what felt like an eternity. My music faded to a din. I could feel the cold drip of the rain against my arm as a bead rolled down hers. My brain screamed but my body did nothing. Eventually someone offered something for her to dry off, and I breathed again.
I didn’t help. I feel a deep shame about that.
I like to analyze and understand things (especially things I’m ashamed of). I’ll dissect a moment until each atom is perfectly labeled. Unfortunately, understanding doesn’t necessarily solve anything. I’m trying to learn that sometimes action is what’s important.
The next moment is another opportunity.
When I see an obstacle in the road, a branch, cone, or scrap of trash, I try to stop and move it. Most of the time I do. As my hand grips the rough bark of a fallen branch, these moments color my mind like sunlight through stained glass.
I don’t know if the practice makes me better.
I hope it shrinks the dessert.
From the Rift
Thanks for Reading
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