Cricket Crawling on Concrete

I started the day out wondering if I would ever get to the end of it. I had hoped to finally finish 'The Siege of Gondor' for Tolkien Tuesday but this doctor's appointment took the wind out of my sails, and for days before. I had to get a ride from my brother John, and that meant starting out very early in the morning as he was going to work. He dropped me off at Plaza Del Rey at about 6:50 AM. The sun hadn't even risen yet. I opened up my camp stool and settled down to wait for the Family Medical Center to open.

Plaza Del Rey is the oldest strip mall in Seguin. When it first opened, when we were teens, we thought it was really something. At this hour of the morning, it looked deserted, if not desolate. As I gazed down the arcade, following the line of overhead lights, it was like looking into the past. I got the eerie feeling if I just stood up and started walking to the right, I might very well go down some kind of time tunnel.

At the far end was the place where there used to be the Mr. Gatti's, where Mike and I (and others) had innumerable adventures both working and after hours. There was the place that used to be Mayfields, a grocery store where John and his friend Will both worked, from which I bought my Savage Sword of Conans and Fotonovels. There was the place that used to be one of Susan's favorite hangouts, Yellow Brick Road, a toystore, and a place called Candy's that served ice cream and had various arcade games. There was the first book store that Seguin ever had, where I saw 'the red LOTR' and bought Master of Middle-earth (and  think got my first Tolkien calendar and where Mom bought me The Silmarillion). And the Family Medical Center was the place I often accompanied Mom to see her doctor, thirty-five years ago. Now here I was, in the same space, different physician, and even older than she ever got to be.

As I sat thinking (I had plenty of time) I saw one solo cricket with a bad hind leg crawling toward me. I thought of the early days of Gatti's when it was not far removed from a swampy field, and how swarms of crickets, drawn by the store's light, would crowd along the night pavement there. It was a periodic (and smelly) job to go sweep them away from the door. This one seemed like a pathetic remainder of a vanished time, like the last buffalo. It was crawling to the left, towards where the arcade ended.

The sun was starting to come up. The safety lights went off; the time tunnel vanished. Suddenly a grackle, black as an omen, came sailing over. It hopped along the concrete a bit, then reached over and snapped the cricket up, and took off again. End of story.