I don't see anything in him²⁶

Yesterday afternoon around three o’clock I asked Vinaya to watch me while I did hill work on 150th Street. He is a good guard, except that he sometimes falls asleep when he is on duty. But this time he was wide awake.

At the bottom of the hill I saw a boy about thirteen or fourteen years old waiting for the Q-44 bus. The boy looked right at me and said out loud, “I don’t know why everybody makes such a fuss about him. I don’t see anything in him.”

There was absolutely nobody else there only he and I. So I looked at him and said, “I don’t see anything in you either.”

Then he was really embarrassed and he turned away. I smiled at him and started running back up the hill.

The boy was very brave to say what he did, and I was also brave. He didn’t walk away; he just turned around and looked at the fence, still waiting for the bus. By the time I went down the hill a second time, the bus had arrived and he had gotten on it. So I didn’t have to encounter him again.