Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“Is there someone who’s supposed to come here and get you?” asked Cleve with a hopeful look. The last thing, obviously, that Cleve wanted to hear was that Lester had driven himself — that the keys to his car were also there in the impregnable locker, that special arrangements would have to be made before the problem could be fully resolved.

“Yes. My wife.” Lester glanced at the clock on the wall. “She’s supposed to be here in a little over an hour. I was going to walk around Town Lake first. It’s a nice day, and I was going to finish my workout by walking around the lake just as my friend Carl and I do. I mean Charlie. It’s what Charlie and I do every Saturday.”

“Well, you can’t go and meet your wife wearing just that towel,” said Manuel, pointing. “Let me get the lost and found box and we’ll find some clothes for you to wear home.”

There was nothing for Lester to do but nod in agreement. It was the best plan. It was the only plan. Audrey was shopping. Lester wouldn’t be able to reach her even if he’d wanted to. She would pull into the parking lot of Town Lake YMCA, not at all expecting that her husband would not have his clothes with him — that, until Manuel brought the lost and found box, all he would have would be a towel.

A few minutes later Manuel returned with the box. Together, Manuel and Cleve and Lester went item by item through the contents of the box of forgotten or abandoned gym clothes.

“This your size?” asked Manuel, holding up a sleeveless Nike workout shirt.

“That shirt reeks, Manuel!” cried Cleve. “Let’s find one that won’t asphyxiate him!”

Clothes — halfway clean clothes — were found which semi-fit. And shoes that didn’t fit at all, but were only needed to get Lester up to the parking lot to meet his wife’s car. Cleve plopped a baseball cap on Lester’s head to complete the mismatched ensemble before making his quick exit.

“See you next Saturday, Lester!” he called. “Key lock: that’s the ticket. Hang the key dog-tag-style on a chain around your neck. That’s what I do. Can’t stand combination locks.”

Manuel had to go too. He had work to do. Lester thanked him again.

For the next fifty minutes, Lester Henderson sat on the wooden bench in front of his locker. He didn’t want to wait upstairs. He didn’t like what he was wearing. He looked silly. He had on oversized sweat pants that ballooned out like harem pants, a sweatshirt a couple of sizes too small, and mismatched sneakers. He took off the cap, and then, feeling warmly about Cleve’s friendly gesture, put it back on again.

At twelve twenty-eight — nearly the time that Audrey was due to pick him up — Lester rose to climb the stairs to the main floor of the YMCA. He turned and started out of the locker room. He took three steps and stopped.

36 right. 6 left. 10 right. It simply popped into his head. He smiled to himself. And then he laughed out loud.

And then he went to unlock his locker. 36 right, 6 left, 10 right, and the lock released. Humming happily, jubilantly to himself, he took off the borrowed clothes and put on clothes of his own from inside the locker. He celebrated his reborn independence by slamming the locker door shut, the noisy clangor reverberating in his ears.

Lester Henderson was spiking his football.

“I’ve been parked out here for nearly ten minutes,” said Audrey from the driver’s side of the front seat as her husband slid in next to her. “I was starting to worry about you.”

“Everything’s okay.”

“Are you having a bad day?”

Lester shook his head. “No, I’m having a good day.” He smiled. “A really good day. Let’s get a burger on the way home.”

The world is a mysterious and often confusing place. Especially for a three-year-old. Nona Connor understood this. She thought of herself as the mother hen and her thirteen little ones as her chicks. But Nona also knew that a three-year-old child should still be allowed some freedom to discover and explore. Every moment carries the possibility of being a learning moment. This was the balance that Nona had learned to strike after nearly thirty years of teaching preschool, or even more specifically, after nearly thirty years of teaching three-year-olds. Always three-year-olds. Less infantile than the two-year-olds (and, praise God, out of diapers!) but more pliable, more trusting than the four-year-olds, who could sometimes be wild and wicked little handfuls.

Nona had her routine down, yet she varied it just enough each year so that she and her assistant, Miss Kalette, would never fall into a rut. There were books and magazines that she browsed for ideas. But a good many ideas came from Nona Connor’s own fertile imagination.

Take, for example, the pointer Nona used each morning to lead her little ones through the big felted sentence strips she had mounted upon her classroom wall — sentences that changed each day. Together she would point, and Susie and Christopher and Jason and K’lynn and Sharry and Amber and Jessica and Jamaal and the others would recite aloud with her: “Today is [Tuesday]. Today’s helper is [Megan]. This week’s color is [green].”

It was the pointer that was special, that was uniquely Nona’s. It had a tiny glove on one end of it filled with batting, and Nona had pulled the thumb and fingers together — all of them but the index finger, so that the finger did the work, and the finger even had a little personality going for it.

There was never a dull moment in Nona Connor’s classroom of easily distracted three-year-olds. Moving them all about the room from activity center to activity center became a game in itself, each of the areas of her preschool classroom — its dull green cinderblock walls hidden behind colorful pictures and displays, easels and cubbies — catching the eye with chromatic splash and warmth and humor. There was a song Nona and Miss Kalette sang that took the children into Circle Time: “Let us take our little mats and sit upon the floor. Today I am a mighty lion. Tell me how I roar. And what , little creatures, be you today? One — two — three — who wants to play?”

For nearly thirty years, Nona Connor had shown up for work at a little past eight in the morning, greeting the equally early-risen director of the Buford Baptist Church Preschool, which was only two miles from Nona’s house in the city of Marietta north of Atlanta. For nearly thirty years, Nona had prepared her classroom for the day. She’d changed the sentence strips on the wall, set out the puzzles upon the puzzle table, arranged the peg boards and sewing cards and interlocking wooden blocks that tiny hands would soon plug and thread and put together and pull apart with serious purpose. Hands that would someday work factory machinery, take blood pressures, draft contracts and steer heavy highway rigs. Nona was old enough now to be teaching some of the children of her first three-year-olds.

And for nearly thirty years, Nona Connor had led her class in the “good morning song”: “Let’s clap hello for Joshua. Clap hello. Let’s wave hello to Heather and Billy and Annaree. Let’s smile hello to Erica and Brock…” And when it came time to lead the children single-file out to the playground, there was even a song that Nona sang which accomplished the task of well-behaved transport with perfect efficiency: “One, two, three. All eyes on me. Four, five, six. Fingers on our lips. Seven, eight, nine. Walking quietly in line. What a funny song we love to sing! Today’s little helper, take your swing!”

There were routines and there was a schedule, and though some flexibility was always allowed — a trip to the filmstrip room on some days, for example, in the place of Quiet Book time, or a visit to the gym on days when there was inclement weather — Nona Connor liked the routine just as much as the children did. It gave her a feeling of security, just as it gave her little three-year-olds a structure and familiarity with the day that kept them feeling safe in an adult-run world of mystery and confusion.