-1994-

CLOSE PROXIMITY

The action was a little too close for comfort. I saw weird things happen while I was a bell ringer. It was my third week on the job. I was moved from outside the Target store to inside the Chico mall in the foot traffic corridor. One day I was ringing my bell when I witnessed gang activity go down a few feet from where I stood with my red bucket full of cash. What I thought was a friendly encounter ended differently.

Three young men sat on a bench. Four other young men wearing beanies were walking towards them, smiles on their faces. Then they stopped and talked amongst themselves. A few feet separated the two groups. They made eye contact. Immediately one young man headed toward the other three. He swiftly approached the bench. Then he hauled off and slapped the other guy’s face just as hard as he could. The young man didn’t blink or react. He remained rigid, stone faced, without any expression. The aggressor and his companions then strutted away, walking with a swagger.

I hadn’t expected the slap. At that point I became vulnerable. This wasn’t friendly mall behavior. What if they wanted the bucket of cash and caused trouble? But they weren’t noticing me. I notified security just as quick as I could, a few minutes later. I reported what I’d seen. She said they’d had some problems before at the mall’s east and west entrances, but that activity was outside the stores. She and her security detail would check the mall. I was located in a central position in the mall.

While standing there, I looked around in the store windows. The window of one store displayed record albums. One album was unsettling as I viewed it. The album was in black and white and displayed a female toddler sitting on the sand and holding a pistol like it was a plaything. Guns and children was not a good look (I had four children at the time). It’s imagery was creepy. I don’t even know what album it was, maybe you do, but I’ve never forgotten it.

The male employees in that same store looked nice. They were dressed in black slacks and white shirts with red ties. I remember thinking that they dressed nicer than school teachers. I was a part-time substitute teacher at the time, and thought the teaching profession had lost its professional edge by not dressing the part. Times had changed. It seemed strange that a nonprofessional dressed up when a professional dressed down (I’m a self-professed dinosaur given to pondering things).

Next, I saw a former employee of my father’s from back in the day strolling the mall. His grown daughter accompanied him. They were dressed to the nines, in black leather jackets and trendy jeans. She was in fashionable heels, and he looked sharp, too. J___ T____ was quite a character. I’d last seen him when I was a teenager, when he was working for my dad. Now I was thirty-something. We talked briefly.

I remembered when we were harvesting almonds with mauls and a sledge topped with canvas tarps pulled by a tractor. We kids pulled the tarps around the trees. J____ and my dad then knocked the tree limbs with hand held mauls, they were heavy things with rubber ends on wooden club-like handles. The almonds fell on the tarps, which we pulled back on the sledge. We shoveled the nuts into gunnysacks. When Dad was gone, J____ liked to gab. He’d stop working to talk. He told us about the woes of his marriage, like we were interested (not). He got hot under the collar when one of us kids said that we should get back to work. He grabbed his maul and proceeded to, hard and fast, bam the tree limbs, barking several of the limbs (barking is when the tree is hit so hard that the bark separates from the tree, scarring and damaging the tree). He didn’t take kindly to our comment.

As we worked, we were always on the lookout for wasps. Sometimes wasp nests full of wasps would fall out of the tree when the limb was shaken. One of us kids would yell, “Wasps!” and we’d all scatter. We’d make a mudplaster with our drinking water to put on our stings. That eased the sting’s pain and kept it from swelling. Then we’d go back to work. It was hard, tedious work, which included working after school till dark. But you do what you have to do, and we didn’t complain.

Aww, the memories.

I made six hundred dollars for four weeks of full-time bell ringing. Land sakes, we needed it. It was enough for Christmas and then some. Bell ringing is an experience that makes you more aware. Take the time to be friendly when you encounter a bell ringer. Be of good cheer!

I hope you have enjoyed these three posts, two of which I never finished when I first wrote them.

This Christmas share the joy. Give to a worthy cause.