Daily Rescue #3

July 22

I'm on a lunch break eating an open-faced sandwich–chicken salad, radishes, focaccia gone twice through the toaster. 

The grass I’m sitting on has, today, become the audience for a children's puppet show–The Magical Forest. To my left is a pile of fabrics and string, coiled on the top of the park slope. The deck, below (where I used to peer over into the creek as a child, where the toddler I first nannied bit through skin when I told him he couldn't go in) is the stage.

On its wooden planked center, a woman crouches to hold up the puppet of an ogre. His face is matcha green, his hair a black puff. In her ogre voice, she thanks the children for their kindness–"Does this mean we're . . . friends?" Some toddlers clap. All of the mothers look down at their children’s faces, scanning for their child’s answer, or muting it with their own. Yes, yes, yes! Everyone with theatrical smiles.

Behind my blanket, a father's voice. He is clinging to a short tree, his two year old daughter standing between his bent legs, gripping a branch. Her yellow Crocs are covered in a film of summer dust. The father is crouching in the canopy, gesticulating from the dappled shade something grandiose. His arm is sweeping the view in front of her, Like Mufasa in The Lion King when he shows Simba what belongs to him –"Everything the light touches."

I can’t make out the subject of his sentence; What story is he telling her?

It's time for the main puppeteer to switch out the ogre for the dragon. The puppet-change is made seamless by an interactive walk up the grass slope through the audience, to the pile of puppets by my blanket.

I watch the ogre-handler make her way through the crowd of strollers and blankets, stopping every few feet to bend, dip and bring the ogre's face eye level to the children: "Thank You an

d YOU and YOU." One toddler gets up and reaches his small hand towards the ogre's face. Trying to touch his eyes. A mother runs after him, her pink summer dress clinging to grass-damp thighs.

I look at the puppeteer as she passes my blanket. Her face is perfectly straight, expressionless. Her voice does all the smiling.

As she assembles the black and blue dragon tail around her shoulders, a younger woman in a fairy princess dress has taken her place on the stage. She is holding a wand; she has no puppet. She is smiling.

. . .

I am on my lunch break. I've worked at the nearby bakery before, keep leaving then coming back, loving or needing the simple exchange: Scone, brioche, hands, smiles, bags. I love when the man who works at the indie bookstore, Sugarfoot, next-door comes in; I want him to ask for something to eat with his iced americano. I want to give him something warm and fatty, something that makes the pages of the novel he is telling me about, sticky, unsellable.

There are two cooks on my shift making more open-faced sandwiches for more people. Each plate is beautiful. Someone carries each one into the grass.

. . .

When I was young, my mother read my twin sister and me children's books in the most animated voices. Her dolphin sounds and cow sounds; her witch and monster and princess sounds were unmistakable, unparalleled. If anyone else read the book to us, it became a different book. Her voice is what we read, what we loved.

Thirty years later, in this grassy auditorium, I worry: Did I ever look up at her face–to see if she really felt like the dolphin? The witch?

. . .

When Eddi or Samuel hands me my lunch, I always look, check–for their face. I want to find a smile. I want to find something that tells me, 'you are not alone in your gladness.'

They owe nothing to me. We share very little in common. Still, I am hungry for it, this shared feeling.

. . .

I look back at the father, still crouching in the trees. I am stretching on my blanket now, feigning a spine twist with a hold. I am trying to tell if he's sincere in his narration. All that you can see. He is now telling his daughter now something about trees, how their roots go on, "For ever and ever and ever." I look at his eyes; his voice is curving upward like a knife spreading butter. Every statement is a wand.

Then I scan down towards his feet: Tevas and tanned toes, gripping the rubber solebeds, trying not to slide. Every smooth nail-bed is a little straight face. They are not smiling, not scorning; just there, holding everything up.

The woman is back on stage now with the dragon assembled; she is making it say with her right hand–"Maybe I won't turn the ogre into a chicken after all." The younger princess is standing behind her, her wand rising to the trees.

. . .

I think about whether this is one of the jobs that will be taken by AI, eventually. Robot ogres and robot dragons in the park, putting on a play for robot nannies and their toddler dependents. Or if every physical space of theater will be replaced by a screen and 3D goggles.

Whenever I ask ChatGBT a question, every answer arrives smiling. There is no face to check.

. . .

When the crowd claps, the woman with the dragon returns, hikes, slower this time, up the green hill back to the pile of puppets. The play is over. 

When she walks past me, I look again, sigh, and return to the second half of my sandwich.

This must go on, I think, beginning to roll up my blanket; put on my shoes. This not-smiling behind the smiling. Forever and ever and ever.