“Stay here!”
I put my arm across two children just as they stepped off the curb for candy. In the bakery window, the parade float was getting bigger. The tractor pulling it was getting smaller.
Thirty-six years of driving a city bus taught me to look twice at anything moving the wrong way in a reflection.
“Behind you!” I shouted.
The volunteer at the rear waved the crossing clear. My granddaughter Paige grabbed the railing. The float rolled a few yards down the gentle slope and came to rest against the curb. Somebody lost a paper crown. Paige lost a shoe.
It could have ended very differently. The parade officials closed the street while the equipment was secured and the people on the float were checked. The two children beside me were more upset about the candy.
Paige came over in one stocking foot. I held up the shoe.
“Still want me home?”
Her eyes filled. The day before, she had suggested I skip the parade. I use a wheelchair now, and the committee had said the route was difficult. She had repeated their words almost exactly: “Grandpa can’t really help this year.”
“I was afraid you’d get hurt,” she said.
“I was afraid you’d be the first parade princess to finish barefoot.”
She sat on the curb and put her shoe on. Then she told me the rest. Nobody had walked the route with a chair. They had decided keeping me home solved the problem.
Next year’s planning meeting took place in the same bakery. Paige arranged the tables so my chair fit. I brought my old route map. We identified a turn with poor visibility, a curb cut that needed clearing, and a good place for grandparents who wanted seats close to the children.
Paige put me in charge of checking the sight lines.
“What does that pay?” I asked.
The baker set down a cream horn.
We shook hands on it.
For more family drama unfolding in the middle of a crowd, read about the raffle ticket my granddaughter insisted Grandpa make them read and the escalator stop that left my son wearing one shoe. And for another surprising moment with a grandchild in the spotlight, there’s the song my grandson played – and the judges credited to him.
