Don't Look, Kids!

My mom likes to shout Watch! whenever a pedestrian crosses the street at an absurdly safe distance in front of the car I am currently driving. No matter how improbable an accident might seem, she is at the ready with a blood-curdling, coronary-inducing Watch!, invariably sending me into a panic as I struggle to reconcile reality as I know it with the reality being experienced in the passenger seat. Every time I hear this shockingly earnest cry I am tempted to jerk the car to the left or right, assuming there must be a deaf toddler just inches away from meeting his grizzly end. Thus, with one haphazardly placed exclamation, a perfectly safe situation has been transformed into a potentially dangerous one.

Luckily, there is a positive flip side to this stress-inducing habit of hers. Every so often, at intervals that are impossible to predict, my mom's futile quest to protect the entire world from itself will lead to transcendent moments of unparalleled glory. One such moment occurred when I was ten years old as my older sister, my mother, and I were leaving the local library on a summer afternoon.

We had just finished returning a towering stack of books, and were heading home with an equally enormous pile. As part of a summer reading initiative, my siblings and I were frantically making our way through young adult fiction in order to earn stamps on a glorified time sheet disguised as a whimsical, winding map. For every book you read, you earned a stamp farther down the map, and at certain milestones you earned prizes. 25 books got you an eraser. 50 books entitled you to a plastic finger monster. At some point, probably after 300 books or so, you would reach the end of the dragon-laden road and earn a prize that could not be purchased at the five and dime.

As we exited the library, walking across the front lawn toward the parking lot where our red Dodge Caravan waited to safely and economically whisk us away, my sister and I heard our mother shout, "Don't look, kids!" Not seeing anything out of the ordinary directly in front of us, our curiosity piqued, we spun around to find out what inappropriate sight had elicited the panicked warning.

And there he was, the man with Down syndrome who was always at the library, hunched over, vomiting in the middle of the lawn. Though aimed directly at the ground, the vomit was clearly of the projectile variety. It was also voluminous, streaming out of his perfectly O-shaped mouth in a dense, orange column, like a well-formed log emerging from the Play-Doh Fun Factory. But it wasn't Play-Doh. It was puke. And it was rocketing out of the esophagus of a mentally retarded, shockingly tall, middle-aged man doubled over on the front lawn of the library in broad daylight.

We would have never known he was there had my mom not said anything, but her Salinger-esque obsession with maintaining the purity of her children's souls wouldn't allow her to keep her mouth shut. Never mind the fact that in third grade I was sent home for telling a classmate that she should, "suck [her] mom's dick." I was innocent and I needed protection.

Was one magnificent, vomiting, handicapped man enough cosmic payback for a lifetime of Watch!es? That's a difficult question to answer, but eighteen years later my sister and I still occasionally say Don't look, kids! to each other when we see something nasty, gruesome, or foul going down, and it never stops being anything less than painfully, ecstatically funny.