The Lost One

October 16, 2009

 

 

 

 

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The Lost One

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LAST NIGHT I WAS CROSSING CRENSHAW BOULEVARD on foot to go back to Ralph’s from the bank ATM for some ice cream. A little boy, about four years old, totally and incongruously alone, was hopelessly distraught on the other side of Crenshaw, standing on the sidewalk close to the street. He looked about ready to run right into the ferocious, unyielding traffic. He was yelling continuously and incomprehensibly in a loud, guttural outpouring of anguish, made all the more poignant by the ghoulish lighting of the street lamps. I thought he had lost his mother, but it turned out to be his father. It was just plain bizarre to see so young a child alone like that in so dangerous a place.

 

I jogged across the crosswalk when I had the green to get to him before he did something rash. It was a spacious, well-lighted area up on the sidewalk, safe enough if you stay put, but I’ve never felt someone as dependent on me in my life as I did in that moment. One felt as though any second he would be dead. He looked in every direction as if ready to start running. I arrived and asked him if he had lost his mother. He nodded “yes” and kept up the outpouring.

 

“It’s okay,” I said, “we’ll find her.”

 

“Okay,” he said, but didn’t quiet down; he kept up that unceasing, heart-rending wail. He held a cup of forgotten ice cream in one hand, and the white stuff was all over his face.

 

“Is she in there?” I pointed down at Ralph’s, fifty yards away. He responded with a long, tortured syllable, shaking his head and pointing the other direction up Crenshaw, saying “he” was over there. There were houses up there, to be sure, but the access to them wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to get rid of me with a red herring. But maybe not: it could just be the direction in general where they lived. I looked through the darkness in the direction he pointed, but only saw a woman on the other side that waited to cross towards us. It wasn’t the likeliest chance that she was the mother, since she was of another race than the boy.

 

I was trying to think fast about how to reunite him with his father. I looked all around. The boy never stopped the incredible, inconsolable caterwaul. In the midst of all this, I looked down the wide, sloping sidewalk along Crenshaw leading back to Ralph’s. Suddenly, and thankfully, a man and a young girl emerged past the thick green hedge parallel with Crenshaw and which lined the parking lot. They were about fifty yards away. They were laden with those white plastic grocery bags. I felt it was a match, like Coriolanus.

 

“There he is!” I said to the boy. He shot a look in the direction I was pointing, turned silent for a moment, then recognized his dad and older sister. He ran weeping and yelling in a scolding tone towards the advancing figures. He didn’t drop the ice cream. The woman in the crosswalk had arrived by then, and she was as unnerved as I was.

 

“I thought he was going to run into the street,” she said to me, astonished at the whole thing.

 

“I know, I thought he was gonna have a heart attack,” I responded. I was a bit shaken up by the experience. It had taken less than a minute, but it was heartbreaking to see a child so unhinged and vulnerable as to be scared out of his mind, seemingly on the verge of suicide. Fortunately he hadn’t run into traffic to get away from me. I could only take a deep breath with the woman, both of us shaking our heads in disbelief, half-nervous, half-chuckling.

 

Afterwards, I felt sure I had had a significant experience. I felt I knew clearly what really mattered in life, and that I had inadvertently found myself – this is what’s important to me, so this is who I am. Who’s to say I was wrong about that? In the end, I just went to Ralph’s and got the ice cream I had been angling for. Then I jotted this down.

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