This wagon is different from most wagons. The sides are wooden panels a foot high. We could remove them if we wanted to, but we don’t want to. The bottom is plain wood. It differs from the sides in the fact that it is not painted bright red. Bryan wheels the wagon into the middle of the street with me right behind him.
“Get in,” he says as we reach the center of the road.
“What?” I say. I’m not going to get in an old wooden wagon aimed down a steep hill.
“Get in,” Bryan says again. He pulls one of the helmets out of the wagon and hands it to me.
“This is so dangerous. I’m not getting in. Let’s go home, Bryan,” I say. I grab his hand and try to drag him back to the house.
“Amma, relax, it’s not that dangerous.” He lets go of my hand and gets the other helmet out of the wagon and slips it on his head. “We have helmets. We’ll be safe.”
I’m still hesitant as I watch him straighten out the wagon so we’ll go straight down.
“Get in,” he says again. I slowly crawl into the wagon. It wobbles whenever my weight shifts.
“Don’t kill me,” I murmur.
“Relax,” Bryan says, “trust me.” He grabs the handle and pushes it back hard against the front of the wagon. “Get back,” he says to me so I scrunch myself into the back panel of the wagon, grateful that Bryan will be in the front.
Bryan gives a slight push and jumps into the wagon. He grabs the handle and pushes it from left to right until we have finally been straightened out. I am hugging myself in the back of the wagon, pulling my knees closer and closer to my body.
“Relax!” Bryan yells to me. His voice seems to stumble with the bumpy road. I close my eyes in a refusal to relax but without sight there is nothing to be afraid of and my entire body calms down. We hit a larger than normal rock and are airborne for one second.
This came out of a story which revolved around the main character (again named Amma) taking a road trip to find someone. Instead of finding the person that she is looking for, she finds a number of other people, including a free spirited young man named Bryan.
My freshman year of college I was doing a lot of things that young people do their freshman year of college. For me, even more so than having the general new experiences, I was making a whole new set of friends. I felt like I had been completely abandoned by the people that I used to know when I got up to University. It wasn’t that they weren’t around. They were. It was just that it had become apparent that we were heading in different directions in our lives. I have always wanted more than to just hang around the same town forever and to start a family right away. I wasn’t working on a career that was conducive to that. It’s not that I don’t think it’s absolutely lovely that they wanted families and that they were working on what they wanted, it just wasn’t for me. I have never wanted the career that I felt half-assed about so that I didn’t feel bad when I quit to have children.
Anyway, I was making new friends and one of them was this wonderful guy named Bryan who had a lovely deep voice and beautiful eyes and who listened to reggae and compared joining fraternities to joining gangs. He skated, which I thought was fantastic because it was something that I always wanted to learn how to do. I thought he was fantastic, so I wrote him into my stories as a person who teaches the main character a lot about herself. The first exercise was an exercise in trust. I think that trusting people is something that I struggle with. I never know who to trust and when I’m supposed to start trusting them. Should I trust that most people are good right away, or should I hang back and watch? I made the character of Amma the same way. She was worried about trusting people and then she goes on this fantastic cross country adventure in search of some guy and along the way she finds all of these people that she has to trust because they know her destination and she does not.
It’s an interesting situation. I still find it difficult to trust people, but I’m trying harder and I see my efforts making a difference in my own life. A positive difference, so that’s a good thing.
(Oh, and the wagon that I'm describing in the beginning is called a Radio Flyer Town and Country. We had one when I was a kid and I hadn't seen anyone else with one like that for years so I thought it was unique to my family. Kids are self-centered like that. Of course there were other wagons like it. The company wouldn't have made just one.)
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