First Impressions - An Anecdote

I was pedaling along on a popular Seattle bike path when I heard a cry of anguish and frustration. I turned my head just in time to glimpse a young person seated or kneeling on the curb just off the path. There was a moment of indecision as I checked my instinct to go back and be helpful with the awareness that I could be getting into something I would later regret. A bad drug trip seemed perfectly plausible, but there by the trail I thought the trouble would most likely be some kind of bike problem. In a few seconds I hit the brakes and leaned into a looping turn that brought me back to the spot of a fellow human being in some kind of distress.

“What’s the trouble? Can I help?”


A young girl, fighting back tears replied, “I dropped my bone and it fell into this street drain. I’ve been trying and trying to get it out with this thing, but now it is broken and the drain cover won’t come up and I don’t know what to do.” She held up a grabbing device about two feet long.


So it wasn’t a bike problem, but it didn’t appear to be drugs. I climbed off my bike and pushed it to a safe place a few feet away. Maybe, I thought, it is some kind of middle school or high school fad in which kids carry a bone around with a grabbing tool. Maybe they can do tricks with them or something. I might mention at this point that I am not above a little odd behavior myself now and then. In fact one of the reasons for my current ride was to drop off in some wild place a young rat who had come to my rat restaurant the previous evening, where the patrons get something to eat and a new place to live – fairly far from my house. The restaurant is portable and at that moment was on a trailer on the end of my bike. The disposition had already been accomplished. The interested reader will find a fuller explanation of this practice posted on this blog on January 30, 2011.


Reaching for the broken tool I said, “Let me have a look at this.” I began to manipulate it and sure enough, though I squeezed the trigger as hard as I could the pinchers at the working end remained about two inches apart. So I tried a few more times, carefully scrutinizing the mechanism. I twisted the handle which rotated relative to the shaft, but nothing seemed to unscrew. Then randomly I pulled the handle away from the shaft and lo and behold the pinchers closed. I tried it a couple of more times before showing, a bit proudly I must say, what I had discovered. I said, “May I try it?”


“Sure. See it down there? It is covered with eyes.”


I could see it about fifteen inches below the grate, within easy reach of the tool. I reached through a gap and began to work the eye covered bone around on the floor of the drain. I pushed it over to one side and managed to get it up onto one end, leaning against the wall of the cavity. Then I got the pinchers in position and pulled the handle back from the shaft. The pinchers closed and in a second the bone came up to the grate. About half way through this exercise my theory of the situation changed. Once it was up near the top of the drain the young lady reached in, grabbed firmly and pulled it out.


It’s hard to say which of us was happier, me, proud of my work, or her, restored to her phone. We hugged and she offered to buy me a drink. I gave her a few strands of Mardi Gras beads I had found on the road about half an hour earlier. She gave me a Day of the Dead key ring she had brought from home in Baltimore, for reasons she knew not. We hugged again and went our separate ways.