Corie Writes

I count—all of the time.  It’s a quirk I’ve had since childhood that I have given up on being embarrassed about.  I count stairs as I walk down them.  Steps from the parking garage to my office.  Tiles in the ceiling.  To 50 before I get out of bed every morning.  But the most important counting of the day comes when I look up at the clock and realize that it is after 5:00.  This is when the countdown to 5:30 begins, minute by minute.

I don’t hate my job.  In fact, the majority of the time I like it.  For a social person like myself it gives me a chance to mingle with a variety of people on a daily basis.  I get the haughty professor who believes that the collection of highlighters neatly arranged on my desk for his personal use, and that he need not put them back where he found them.  For him I am always equipped with an icy glare and a monotone “Good morning.”  But then there are the riotous public patrons who glide into the building and say things that lead me to believe they bathed that morning in a tub of creepiness.  “Let me see your shoes,” from windbreaker man who I now believe that in addition to having a thing for underage girls also has a foot fetish.  But they make for great stories when I get home. 

And then there are the students.  Because there are so many of them, the students run the gamut.  The super-nice guy, who comes in every day at the same time and always stops to chat, helps me get through the drowsy mid-day.  The haughty girl who snaps at me as though I am her personal secretary and I just handed her a cup of cold coffee, has no clue that book she really needs isn’t checked out, I just refuse to give it to her.  If she was nicer I would probably not only check it out to her, but let her have it for an extra hour or two.  In essence, the library lets me play out my cattiness when appropriate but also gives me an arsenal of excellent people to talk to.

But even if I like it, come 5:30, I’m ready to go home.  Most days there is some force that prevents me from leaving at 5:30 on the dot, a quick check-in with a colleague who is headed out of town or a few books that should be run up to offices before the end of the day.  There is one day in recent history that I walked out the door at 5:30: Halloween Day.

Halloween was always a favorite holiday for both my brother and I.  As kids, we relished in selecting the perfect costumes and cleverly constructing them.  The year Tony went as a mummy he started the night covered in a complete layer of 2-ply bathroom tissue.  But as the evening came to a close he arrived at home with an overloaded bag of candy and only a few scraps of toilet paper clung to him.

Last year I didn’t do anything for Halloween.  The day was simply too close to when he had died, and there was too much of a connection between him and this particular holiday.  This year I decided nothing was going to prevent me from dressing up, and I had selected the perfect costume: a sock monkey.  Anyone out there that knew Tony knew that he loved monkeys.  He always had a plethora of monkey paraphernalia decorating whatever apartment or house he happened to be living in at the time. 

The monkey costume was recycled—I wore it two years ago to work.  But I remember when I told Tony what I had dressed up as that year, the excitement in his voice was palpable, and I knew he was jealous he hadn’t thought of it first.  I assumed if anyone would approve of re-wearing this costume, it would be Tony.

When I walked out the doors of the library at 5:30 on Halloween, the only thing I was thinking of was that costume.  I walked to the parking garage thinking about how I would do my monkey hair.  I pulled out of the garage thinking about if people would know what I was dressed as.  As I stopped at the stoplight waiting to turn onto Grand I was thinking about how I wished I had taken a picture of my costume before so my brother could have seen it.

Thinking still, I looked out my window to the left to see if I could turn right and spotted a little boy sitting in the backseat of the car next to me, his window parallel with mine.  The weather was unseasonably warm for the last day of October and both of our windows were down.  This little boy, probably only two or so, had yet to learn the hard lesson from his parents that staring at strangers is not a socially acceptable thing to do.  He was staring at me.  And then he smiled, and stretched his arm out the window as far as he could, wiggling his fingers at me. 

Right there, in the middle of the street, I reached out my arm too.  And wiggling my fingers, I stretched as far as I could toward him.  My fingers grazed the palm of his hand, settled on the soft innocence of his skin, and just as his mother pulled forward to make her left turn he giggled.

As I counted one…two…three…seconds that my hand touched to his, I realized I didn’t have to get out of my car to play in the street.  I just had to find the innocence Tony and I once possessed and touch it again.