Other

Breakfast was a meal he avoided on principle, or something approaching principle. When asked, he’d  tell people that he just wasn’t hungry, but it was more complex than that. Years ago he’d been reading about the starving children in Africa and had determined that if he could just skip one meal a day that his meal could somehow go to those children who needed it so much more. He’d been fourteen or so at the time, and so skipping breakfast had come easy, his parents never asked. Are you eating breakfast is not the type of question that parents ask a boy of fourteen.

The logic was off of course, as it nearly always is. One’s impact in the world can be simultaneously negligible and yet vitally important as it related to a constituent part of being either an American or citizen of the world. These two facts often stood next to each other in his mind and occasionally he abided by the first, buying water bottles, eating from fast food restaurants, driving instead of walking, and sometimes the second, stopping by the farmer’s market, holding the door open for elderly women, skipping breakfast on principle. It had occurred to him sometime within the first year that his refusal to eat breakfast wasn’t serving his intended purpose, that those kids in Africa were not now feasting on the bowl of Special K that he’d not had that morning. They were not tossing a banana back and forth that he’d failed to consume. In fact, one could argue, that the bananas that his mother kept having to throw in the trash at the end of the week because they’d gone brown was more wasteful than eating it would have been, which is not to get into any of the ethical implications of eating a banana from a third world country anyway, which is why he stuck with the whole idea. Not because it made sense as a logical construction, but because at least he didn’t have to make any inquiries to himself about it. He only had to answer to other people who were genuinely less critical or interested in what he did and why he did it.

He’d seen one dead person from up close once in his life. He’d been young, seven or so, riding in the back seat of a friend’s car, crossing town to get to baseball practice when they’d heard sirens in the distance. The driver, his friend’s mother, had continued on, past scrub oaks and dry star thistle on the side of the road where fires usually happened when some careless kid tossed a cigarette out the window, probably thinking, he now saw that the sirens had to be from some fire. It was early summer, and hot, the pavement was burning and reeked of tar, flashes of white hot light glanced in the window.

They were one of the first few cars to pass the boy lying in the road, well before the arrival of the paramedics. He couldn’t remember now what he’d seen or understood at the moment, and what he’d read in the papers afterward. The car had slowed, discretionary rather than rubber necking. His mother’s friend, a nurse, told them to look away. The boy was lying in the road, his head had been smashed in a way that blood pooled out on the cement, a cracked egg. He couldn’t remember if the boy’s brother had been visible or not, the older brother who was supposed to help him cross the street safely. And somehow one or the other of them had stepped out from the dry grass and gravel on the side of the road and into the street, not seeing or realizing or knowing, that no oncoming driver would see them because of the long curve. He couldn’t quite picture what happened. Was the car parked by the side of the road, the car that had hit the boy, white? He didn’t know.

He just knew that he’d carry within himself, forever, the memory of that day, the body lying in the street in a pool of blood, and the idea of the older brother, now in his thirties carrying around himself the memory of that day, and the driver, perhaps now sixty, still musing on that day, on the curve, on whether there had been enough time stop if he’d just been going a bit slower, that afternoon, like a pile of stones that the two of them would carry around forever, pockets full.