I saw five boys running across the street today. God, they made me happy. I almost laughed out loud.
One on a skateboard, four more following close behind, they feigned leisure, briskly but boldly skipping across the street, gangly arms and legs flailing, putting on confidence, as if jaywalking in 5:00 traffic on North Lamar were nothing to worry about.
Traffic slowed. A few cars screeched to a halt in a kind of overcompensation, an absurd incarnation of my own exaggerated mother-worry. Maternally, what they did terrified me. But as a woman, as a girl, they thrilled me.
They were boys. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Young men, I suppose, by today's standards, by physical standards certainly. But still just little boys. Full of themselves, they simply crossed the street, laughing, daring each other. I saw glistening eyes and giant smiles, flashes of teeth and braces. Big beautiful hands wadded up into casual fists that moved as they jogged in front of my car, bony wrists and knuckles protruding through gloves bought by fat, over-protective women.
I saw a green flack jacket, a black knitted cap, a red windbreaker, a brown book bag, and dark denim jeans. I saw a couple of trendy scarves, some very stylish haircuts, and tennis shoes. The tallest one wore sandals and no socks in a gritty defiance to the cold (and whoever else was looking, I guess). I saw skinny legs, sculpted arms, lean and lanky torsos through thin t-shirts and sweaters, scrawny asses. I saw cheekbones, big ears, jawlines, acne, dirty hair. I saw peach-fuzz.
Little men. Men, save that they were no more worried than the worry that comes with next week's test and you and I know that doesn't mean shit in the grand scheme of things. They probably say that out loud to one another - that next week's test doesn't mean shit. They think they know that, but they don't. Not really.
The way they cavalierly strolled in front of me and a few other inconvenienced commuters on Lamar was so inane. They were so arrogant, but in such a fresh way that I can't help but appreciate it, appreciate them. They crossed our paths so obliviously overwrought with the debate between their strong, ripe bodies and their own desperate boyhood. They oozed with juvenile conflict and of course they didn't even know it. And I just sat there, like an old woman, like a mother, like a stranger, like just another woman in just another car. I sat there beside other men and women who sat there in their cars. I noticed those other men and women briefly and they seemed frustrated, angry, shocked at the nerve of it. Maybe they were angry. Or maybe they just don't get it. Or maybe I just don't get it. Who gets it?
While they honked their horns and gawked at the boys' audacity, I was ogling their very existence. I stared head on like a love-struck girl mouth open to catch flies, watching five boys pass me by. I witnessed a crude manifestation of growing up, like a filmstrip in Social Studies, as five young men confidently put sandaled feet one in front of the other on the pavement, right in front of my aging and unbelieving eyes. And then they walked across the parking lot and into Half Price Books, as if nothing at all had happened.
To be young again. Oh, that's not it. To just be again. Yeah. Wasn't it good to just
BE.
