me laugh. He wanted to be in show business, and one joke after another flew from him. I had my mom write down his name, so when he became famous, I would remember meeting him. Years later, I had reason to track him down, and though he didn’t become famous, I’ll never forget the first or the second time we met.
At Riverside Commons, he pulled to the curb and, before Mom could pay him, he said, “Wait, wait,” and got out of the taxi and came around to the rear curbside door and made a production out of opening it for us and presenting the park with a sweep of his hand, as if he had prepared it just for us. He was a portly man with bushy eyebrows and a rubbery face made for comedy, and everything about him suggested fun, except that I noticed his fingernails were bitten to the quick.
When we were on the sidewalk and Mom paid him, he took the fare but refused the tip. “Sometimes the quality of the passengers is the gratuity. But here’s something I want you and your boy to have.” From a pocket he took a pendant on a chain. When my mom tried to refuse it, he said, “If you don’t take it, I’m going to yell ‘Help, police’ until they come running, and I’ll make the most outrageous charges, and by the time we resolve the matter down at police headquarters, it’ll be too late to have your day in the park.”
Sylvia laughed, shook her head, and said, “But I can’t accept—”
“It was given to me by a passenger six months ago, and she told me she wanted me to give it to someone, and I asked who, and she said I would know when I met the person, but now it turns out to be two people, you and your boy. It’s luck on a chain. It’s good luck. And if you don’t take it, then it’s bad luck for me. Good luck for you, bad luck for me. What—you want to ruin my life? Were my jokes that terrible? Have a heart, lady, give me a break, take it, take it, before I scream for the city’s finest.”
There was no refusing him. After he drove away, we found a bench and sat there to examine the pendant. It had been fashioned from two pieces of Lucite glued together and shaped into a heart roughly the size of a silver dollar. Within the heart was a small white feather. It must have been glued there, but such an excellent job had been made of it that the feather looked fluffy, as though it would flutter inside the heart if you blew on the Lucite. A small silver eyehook, screwed into the top of the heart, received a silver chain.
“It must be really valuable,” I said.
“Well, sweetie, it’s not Tiffany. But it is pretty, isn’t it?”
“Why did he give it to you?”
“I don’t really know. He seemed to be a nice man.”
“I think he likes you,” I said.
“Actually, Jonah, I believe he gave it to me to give to you.”
With something like awe, I took the pendant from her when she held it out to me. “You really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
When I held the chain and allowed the dangling heart to turn back and forth, the polished Lucite looked almost liquid in the sunlight, as if the feather floated in a great drop of water that cohered magically to the eyehook. Or in a tear.
“What bird do you think it’s from?” I asked. “A pigeon?”
“Oh, I expect it’s from something more grand than a pigeon. Don’t you think it must be from some kind of songbird, one with a particularly sweet voice? I do. That’s what I think.”
“Then it must be,” I said. “But what’ll I do with it? It’s a heart, it’s like a girl’s jewelry.”
“And you can’t be seen wearing a girl’s jewelry—is that it?”
“I already get teased about being skinny.”
“You’re not skinny. You’re lean.” She elbowed me in the side. “You’re a lean, mean music machine.”
She always made me feel like more and better than I knew myself to be. I thought then that lifting a child’s spirits was something every mother did effortlessly. But as the years passed, I saw the world more clearly and knew how fortunate I was to have been brought to life by the grace of Sylvia Bledsoe.
There on the park bench, I said, “Mr. Gluck said it’ll bring good luck.”
“Never hurts to have some.”
“He didn’t say you could make a wish on it.”
“That’s easy luck, Jonah. Easy luck always turns bad. You want the kind of luck you have to earn.”
“Maybe it’ll be okay if I carry it in my pocket—you know, instead of wearing it.”
“I’m sure that’s fine. Or keep it in a nightstand drawer. The important thing is to keep it safe. When someone gives you a special gift, never treat it lightly. If you treat it like a treasure, then it’ll be one.”
When, years later, I learned who had given it to the cabbie and what it meant, the pendant would indeed prove to be a treasure.
With the pendant in my pocket, it seemed that the cloud-free summer sky blazed bluer than ever. The day was warm, and this part of the city looked cleaner than the part that we’d come from. As noon approached, the trunk shadows shrank toward the trees, and the web of branch shadows spread equally in all directions as if spooled out by spiders. The sun spangled the big pond, and through the quivers of light, we watched scores of fat koi that swam there from spring through autumn before being moved to indoor aquariums. Mom bought a twenty-five-cent bag of bread cubes, and the fish ventured right up to us, fins wimpling, mouths working, and we fed them.
I felt the most unexpected tenderness toward those koi, because they were so beautiful and colorful and, I don’t know, like music made flesh. My mom kept pointing to this one and that one—how red, how orange, how yellow, how golden—and suddenly I couldn’t talk about them because my throat grew tight. I knew if I talked about them, my voice would tremble, and I might even tear up. I wondered what was wrong with me. They were just fish. Maybe I was turning sissy, but at least I fed the last of the bread to them without embarrassing myself.
Almost half a century later, I feel that same tenderness toward nearly everything that swims and flies and walks on all fours, and I’m not embarrassed. Creation moves and astonishes if you let it. When I realize how unlikely it is that anything at all should live on this world spun together from dust and hot gases, that creatures of almost infinite variety should at night look up at the stars, I know that it’s all more fragile than it appears, and I think maybe the only thing that keeps the Earth alive and turning is our love for it.
That day in the park, after the koi, we walked the paths through the groves of trees and through the picnic grounds and around the baseball field. There weren’t as many people as I expected, probably because it was a workday. But when we started to talk about lunch, two guys, maybe sixteen or seventeen, fell in behind us, walking close to us, moving faster if we moved faster, slowing when we did. They were talking about girls they dated the night before, how hot the girls were and things they did to them. They wanted my mother to hear. I didn’t know all the words they used, didn’t understand everything they were bragging about having done, but I knew they were being rotten. That kind of thing didn’t happen often back then. It just didn’t. People wouldn’t tolerate it. People weren’t so afraid in those days. I threw the two trash talkers a couple of mean looks, and my mother said, “No, Jonah,” and kept walking toward the Kellogg Parkway exit from the Commons. But the braggarts talked filthier and started to comment on my mother’s shapeliness.
Finally she stopped and turned to them, one hand in her purse, and said, “Back off.”
One of them was a white kid, the other a mulatto, which was a word we used back then, meaning half black, half white. They were cocky and grinning, hoping to terrify her a little if nothing else.