I ate at a preppy Latin chain restaurant this evening.
Never mind which one.
A child in a stroller,
and his marginally older brother,
had settled into a booth
waiting for Mom and Dad to bring their food.
Between the register and the table,
Mom and Dad decided it was a nice evening
to eat outdoors on the patio.
Stroller-son, however, had already staked his homestead
and was not “down” with the concept of moving.
As children will,
he publicized his displeasure
with a single, temple-jarring howl of wild abandon.
(No one actually looked at him of course. That would have been rude.)
Then he wound down.
Silence ensued.
A quick upward jab of the thumbs reseated my fillings,
and I knew in my spine the meaning of “pregnant pause”:
Was the child finished? Exhausted already?
Or was he just reaching down into himself,
reloading with magnum rounds,
preparing himself for the short, one-note aria
that would stall the soda machine
and set off the car alarms in the nearer rows?
We waited in that golden span of quiet, strangers huddled in the eye of a hurricane.
The tension grew with every moment.
Time seemed to stop. Stronger men than I were already weeping with fear.
Then, an unexpected Deus ex Machina:
the door thumped closed.
We knew without looking that the child was on the other side,
and our cowering flipped instantly to bravado
knowing as we did that we were now safely beyond the child’s blast radius:
“What-evah. Talk to the hand.”
Original idea published on the Shelley Berman site, May 4, 2004.