Don't worry, kid, I did the same thing...

Another sign of summer at Holden: the past week or so has seen us attempting to mitigate the crushing flow of people through the dining hall at meals by setting up two buffet lines, instead of just one. Things are still pretty hectic. Soon I and much of the inner "winter community" will abandon the project of eating in the dining hall altogether because it will get too crowded. Those days aren't quite here yet, but there's still a certain pressure to navigate the food line efficiently, get your dishes to the dish pit, free up your chair, etc., etc. This is the only excuse with any semblance of adequacy that I can come up with for how I resolved a fierce inner debate about whether to cut in front of a three-year-old girl in the line for lunch.

Now what actually happened was this: mom had the little girl's plate and was moving along, selecting food for the both of them, with Little Sally in tow and periodically peering over the table's edge to contemplate a lettuce bin. Not a huge obstruction; in fact, no more than forty and a bit inches of obstruction, so in the end I resolved the situation by simply reaching over the girl's head for the lettuce tongs.

Except while I was piling up my salad, she backed up and climbed onto my feet.

I thought, Okay.

And then I announced, "All right, we're going to move now." Efficiency, after all. I needed to get in reach of the cucumbers.

Little Sally grasped the edge of the table and walked right along with me, her feet on my feet.

We did this twice before mother looked over and child looked over and child realized she was NOT standing on mum's feet after all.

And you know, part of me felt bad -- because I can remember that day, that instant, looking up and realizing the navy suit pant and the leg inside it I was clinging to was not my father's, but the man my father had engaged in conversation just outside the church. I can remember grabbing a perfect stranger's hand at a theme park and hearing him explain in heavily accented English, "Child, it's not me -- it's not me." I can remember those things because they were jarring. Little brushes with a world I didn't know was out there, where people live and die and go to church and public schools and theme parks and yet unforeseeably, unaccountably aren't in my family. Good heavens.

I have a secret. When you get to be roughly grown-up-size, which I am -- it still happens, you're on the other side, it's hilarious, and you stop feeling bad for terrorizing the young person almost immediately.

Almost.