I remember the day I learned that some people go into hospitals, and just like blue jays, steal mothers’ brand new babes. It was then, but is no longer, the worst thing I had ever heard. It was then I decided you can never trust a pretty bird.

With tennis shoes and a mission to collect field research, I walked the state fair. Breathing in fumes of newly poured blacktop, I spied two brothers ruffling one another's hair. One of them came barely before the other into this world and I much before the both. I wondered what my additional decades gave me and what from me they stole.

A pretty-skinned boy sat across from me on the bus. He was slipping into and out of sleep repeatedly. He looked painfully tired the way children often do.   His mother shook and scolded him each time his eyelids gave in to his exhaustion. She slapped his hands, which were so puffy and small that the knuckles looked concave. I suppose she had her reasons. But the boy, out loud, and I, in loud, whined, whined, and wished she weren’t the boss of him.

Where exactly I was I do not recall, but what I was I do. I was a sunburnt, lonesome young adult who knew better than to get sunburnt and was just being dramatic about calling myself lonesome. The littlest of ladies, seated on a park bench close by, peeked-and-booed me for five minutes. She looked at me in a way that I hadn’t been seen in a while. This girl closed her eyes just to open them at me again. Would it always feel that important to be seen? Would it ever be enough just to see? The jury is still out.

I dropped a two-year-old on a concrete gymnasium floor when I was in third grade. Parent-teacher conferences or something, and they let us run ourselves out of energy while the adults talked about whatever they felt they needed to. I was a dinky little thing, couldn’t lift my backpack half the time, but I thought I could lift this young boy onto my shoulders and give him a fun ride. Just like the dads do. When I lost my balance and he fell hard onto the floor, I pretended I didn’t do it. I pretended, even worse, that I didn’t notice. It’s amazing how long that was my natural reaction to serious situations.

My father has always been a good neighbor, shoveling snow well past the boundaries of his yard and such. General good looking out. A few years back, he told me that he’d stopped flashing his headlights at oncoming cars when he scoped out a police speed trap. He had seen something on TV about a kidnapper getting caught in the act of abduction simply because he got pulled over for speeding. Often, I think about the kids trapped in cars my dad no longer signals and how maybe some of them get saved.  More often, I think about the reality that no matter what we do when we’re cruising down I-94 at night, there are many cars that get from A to B uninterrupted, even when the passengers in those cars are more afraid of B than anything else in the world.

A young girl, grey-minded and blue-blooded just like the rest of us, wobbled down the sidewalk and bent her knees to level with the earth. She picked up worm after worm and placed them in the freshly soaked grass. If she could help it, not a single creature would die by a bike tire or a left-foot Nike. Onlooking, I turned that scene into the big picture (as college had taught me to do) and imagined all of the American people as worms and as the shoe coming down. Then I punched myself in the thigh for being such a tool, thought about my massive loan debt, and picked up a rain-drawn worm to put back in the grass just because I felt like it.