Vignettes

I was on the bus with two friends early on a Sunday afternoon. Sitting across from me was a boy (I say boy, he was probably 27) with a tie-dyed maroon t-shirt and unkempt curly hair threatening to spontaneously dread. He was so engrossed in his book that I could watch him without him knowing it. He was reading Anthem by Ayn Rand, which surprised me. It didn't seem to fit. But it's funny how Ayn Rand, whose heroes and heroines are all thin and angular and glamourous by virtue of their superiority and single-minded drive, is read mostly by my transient, cynical, earth-wandering generation.
The bus stopped to let people off, and then a man hopped onto the first step, not to ride the bus, but to ask the driver a question. Then another person came, with another question. Then another. And, finally, one more. I turned to look at my friends with an ironic smile, but met his eyes instead. Just for a second, but a longish one. His smirk mirrored mine, and I knew we were thinking the same thing.

I was walking through a pristine shopping center, four stories tall and full of the same stores that are in every mall, the kind of place that turns my stomach a little and makes me miss trees really really badly, when I saw a penguin statue made of metal objects. Made of...trash. Only now it wasn't. I kept circling around it, trying to identify all these old bits of old things. A hubcap. An ice-cream scoop. A piece of refrigerator door. It was beautiful, and it made me feel a little more hopeful about human civilization. Someone had seen possibility in all these discarded human objects, a chance to create using old material. But really, what thing isn't created out of old material?

Way back in the midst of my naive youth, I worked at a restaurant inside a hotel. I was the room-service girl, and it was one those days where I seemed to be running around like crazy while everyone working in the restaurant-proper had nothing to do. A tray of leftover desserts was brought down from a catering event, and all of us lingered in the kitchen, eyeing which one we wanted. Then I had to rush off to answer the room service line. Many orders, many trays, many elevator trips, no dinner break and several hours later, I wandered back into the kitchen to see the counter empty and the tray gone. Sigh. Mel, a cook from Mexico who spoke fairly decent English and liked to call me "princess", comes into the kitchen and sees me. He lifts the silver cover off a plate to reveal the exact fruit tart I had been drooling over. "I save this. For you," he says in his soft and gravelly accent, with his big brown eyes smiling at me. And suddenly the word "gift" was completely re-defined.