R Taylor Grow
It started with a shout. I was behind the counter, preparing to clean the dining room, which, admittedly, was not dirty, when she yelled at me. Apparently the drive-thru was busy. I clearly did not understand how Wendy’s operated.
So I took my position at the fry station and moodily stuffed over-salted, naturally cut French fries into medium-sized cartons, all the while listening to my co-workers audibly complain about my incompetence. When the rush ended, and my manager apologized for shouting at me, I grabbed a bottle of piss-colored cleaning solution and retreated to the dining room. And then I began to cry the profound martyr-tears I imagine all 20-year-olds release when they have been reprimanded by a fast-food superior.
As I stood by one particular table, endeavoring to suppress my body-quaking sobs, I heard a little voice behind me.
“I’ve been watching you.”
I turned around to find a small brunette child, perhaps six years old, in a purple dress, staring at me with that intensity only young children can conjure because they do not understand the grave nature of unfaltering eye contact. I hunched a little and returned her stare playfully, “You’ve been watching me?”
“Yes.” It was assertive. She smacked her little hand on a clean tabletop. “You should clean this one.”
I cleaned that one. Her little fist slammed on the adjacent table. I cleaned the adjacent table.
The girl began to tell me something else, but I heard a complicated order over my headset and knew that I should return behind the counter before my manager once more provoked my childish sensitivity. I explained that I had to return to my station and prepared to wave goodbye to my purple-dress savior, but she had lost interest during my explanation and had already begun bouncing toward a middle-aged couple eating chili and salads in the back of the restaurant.
Although I did not skip behind the counter with the spritely grace of a blithe six-year-old, when I returned to the fry station and the gurgling grease and the feeling of an unnatural armor forming on my forehead, I quietly thanked the young girl for her help in my forgetting — albeit for only 47 seconds — that I was embarrassed and excluded from my co-workers’ clique and inept at a job I proclaimed I could master in days.
Children possess an almost magical ability to stop man from taking himself too seriously. In that candid way they confess that they have violated the social pact that forbids man from shameless staring, they remind him that the immutable social rules that govern his interactions are, ironically, completely arbitrary. When they slap a tabletop with their tiny and passionate palms, they force him to remember that there is nothing wrong with sudden bursts of enthusiasm for something completely mundane. When they tell him to clean tables that are noticeably devoid of anything like dirt, they draw upon the notion that sometimes he can be whimsical, that he can spray piss-colored solution on anything he wants because he commands the trigger.
When a child enters one’s life, if only for 47 seconds, she reminds him that he can play along. There should be few things more important to someone in the midst of something lachrymose and self-pitying than remembering that there is a spirited brunette child in a purple dress that will skip away from him if he indulges too much in his 20-year-old pseudo-problems.