Brody

I was going to tell you about a yellow t-shirt and a child waving, as an illustration of the happiness of grace/gift economy, but there's something else I want to tell you about instead because it made me laugh (I'll come back to the t-shirt and the child tomorrow).

Let me say at the outset that it makes clear you may not know when you're standing next to a novelist who is making mental notes of everything you say.

This happened when I went to Asda to get some donuts in preparation for seeing my grandchildren later in the day. If you have read my book The Wilderness Within You (it says the publication date is January 1897, but I assure you that though I am old I'm not that ancient) then you'll know all about the crossing at Silverhill, which is where I was today, waiting for the pedestrian light to go green so it would be safe to cross the road.

I wasn't alone. Alongside me — we are Covid-adapted these days and keep careful little moats of space around ourselves — stood a young woman with her small son. He must have been about eight. I quickly learned his name was Brody.

The sequence of lights in Silverhill means that crossing in the direction we were going requires patience. As we stood there, waiting for one stream of traffic after another to take its turn before our go came round, Brody's mother became anxious about the plastic picnic bottle with orange juice in it that he was carrying. 

"If you drop that," she said, rather more loudly and aggressively than was entirely warranted (I thought) "you won't be picking it up!"

Brody sounded puzzled. "Who will, then?" he asked, bewildered.

"No one!" exclaimed his mother, with a certain amount of relish that baffled Brody further.

"Won't you?" he asked.

"No I will not!" she exclaimed.

"Why not?" Brody asked her, mystified.

"Because this is a busy, dangerous road!! Do you want me to get killed!?"

Brody probably didn't but he may have wondered for a moment.

His mother warmed to the subject. "If you drop that bottle," she said, "It'll just have to get run over. It'll be gone. You'll have lost it."

"We'll have to get another one," Brody suggested.

"No we won't!" countered his mother. "Do you think I have money flowing out of my backside?!"

Brody didn't say.

I confess at this point I was so captivated by the prospect of the young woman at the crossing standing there with money flowing out of her backside that I became momentarily distracted from their conversation and didn't pay attention to Brody's reply. But it triggered a stream of dire warnings from his mother — "Don't speak to me like that or you'll get nothing! We won't go into town! We'll go straight home! Do you want to go into town — (etc etc etc)"

Thank the Lord, the lights changed then and I didn't have to listen to her any longer.

No such luck for Brody.