Lunchtime
Yesterday, I heard the sound of children laughing. I had to pause and listen. They were coming out for lunch, heading to the tables beneath the trees. One of them chased a squirrel. Another called out a shouted admonishment to stop. They threw their lunches on a picnic table and turned to see who was coming to join them. I walked on and thought of the days when I ate my lunch beneath the trees in Texas.
It was the second grade. The year started in California. My father got transferred. We stopped in San Antonio to stay with his mother. I enrolled in a nearby school. I knew no one except my Aunt Niza who worked in the cafeteria, and we ate beneath the big trees. We soon moved on to Corpus Christi where I finished my second-grade career. I knew no one, except the nice teacher who told my mother not to worry, I’d learn to read. An unremarkable year marked only by my participation in drug trials for the new Salk polio vaccine.
We eventually made our way back to Texas and I’ve been here ever since. My Aunt Niza is still here, too, buried along with her brother, my grandfather, in a plot just down from the one occupied by my wife alongside a grave marked for me in the cemetery just down the road where one can sit in the shade of the big trees and think about second grade lunches and any other thing an old man might care to remember.