Daily Rescue #6

July 27

1. I'm at the airport, buying a new charger for my headphones.

   
   

   In line for the self checkout machine, I point and say—"Oh my God, look!"

   
   

   The man ahead of me is pressing a cheese & cracker plate to his checkered chest when he hears me, and says—"Wow, I wonder how that got there?"

   
   

   Laying flat atop the blue palettes of gum, above the rows of stacked candy bars, is a half eaten chocolate chip cookie. It is uniform in color and pattern, a Chewy Chip's Ahoy, maybe.

   
   

   I look at the bite marks, expecting them to be small—from a mouth who still thinks, if Mom doesn't see, I am invisible.

   
   

   But they are not. They are more teenager-sized. Now, they say, Look at me. I was here.

   
   

   …

   
   

   At my gate, I am still wondering—about who left it, and why.

   
   

   But, mostly, I am wondering if the man with the cheese and crackers is still wondering about it; if his desire to know (how things get left behind, how things we want become things we don’t) that he claimed, was real—or if this hunger too was cut short, left or given up there, at the register.

   
   

2. A young boy is riding a bike, a small one, low to the dusty ground. I'm talking to his Nanny about how dogs can be fine one day and then not fine at all the next, when the boy's handle bars (short like he is) brush one of Fredo's ears, bend it forward and down, so that his face, if I were walking towards him, would look like a Labrador's. I have no children yet. But Fredo's response suggests that we are used to this—this moving within a pack, this letting bodies who don't know where they're going yet, change us, move us. He does nothing, just keeps keeps walking, just keeps leading us home.