I had a dream once. It was actually a life goal, and I was semi-serious
about it for approximately three years. My brilliant plan was to purchase every
single PEZ dispenser ever made and one day, Chad and I would retire, sell my record-setting
collection, and live like kings off the proceeds. I started collecting in 1997,
when the internet wasn’t the most convenient way to shop for rare PEZ
dispensers. It took minutes to
“dial-up” and the websites took even more
minutes to load. I didn’t have time for such nonsense so I relied on local
antique stores and collectors. Not far from our apartment in Seattle, I found a
shop called Gasoline Alley which specialized in vintage and collectible toys.
One humid summer afternoon, we left Gasoline Alley with my
newest investment: A MIB (that’s mint-in-bag for you non PEZ-collecting
imbeciles) Indian Peace Pipe from the 1970s. Never released in the United
States, this was a rare find and would surely buy us a villa in Tuscany upon
retirement. We were young, kid-free, and living in Seattle. What else was there
to spend $75 on?
We climbed into our 1989 Nissan Sentra, rolled down the
windows because we didn’t have air conditioning, pushed the Beastie Boy’s
cassette into the tape deck, and headed for home. I was clutching my new
purchase, anxiously trying to propel us home by sheer willpower, so that
I could get my peace pipe into the safe and breathe easy. And by “safe” I mean
the shoebox under our bed.
We approached a four-way intersection and stopped at the red
light. Over the music, I heard a loud clack-clack-clack.
It was rhythmic, unfamiliar and right outside my passenger window. I looked up to
see a man wearing dark glasses, crossing the street alone using a cane as his
guide. I gasped and squeezed Chad’s arm in a panic. Not because I was shocked
to see a blind person—I see them all the time (actually, I don’t, I see like,
one a month). Any other day, at any other time, my mind wouldn’t have even
registered this scene. After all, he was following the traffic sign, he was
walking in the crosswalk. Guess who else was in the crosswalk? We were.
Our car was stopped in the middle of the crosswalk, the
light was red, and the car behind us was so close that I could smell the
driver’s breath. As the clack-ing
got louder, I braced myself for impact.
Hindsight is 20/20 and that’s not a joke because the guy was
blind. It’s easy to look back at my twenty-year old self and want to say, “Hey
Rachel? Why don’t you warn the poor guy instead of sitting there like moron? Oh yeah, and your retirement plan sucks.”
But my twenty-year old self was too mortified to do anything but pinch Chad
with one hand and grip my future riches with the other. I pulled my
shoulders up to my ears and slid down in my seat hoping that would make me invisible... to the blind guy.
His cane hit my door first. And then his knees did. He waved
his hands in front of his body trying to decipher what was blocking what should
have been a clear path for him. As he was groping, his hands passed through the
rolled-down window, inches from my cowering face. I held my breath, waiting for it to end. Remember in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, how Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin hide under the tree roots from the Black
Rider as he searches for them? Put those hobbits in a Nissan Sentra, stick a cane in that Nazgul's iron-clad hand and you have an exact replica of what we went through. Chad and I sat motionless as we watched the poor guy fumble his way to the front
of the car and complete his journey across the street. (Click here to watch the LOTR clip)
I thought about that blind man today. I wondered where he is and if,
when he’s having dinner with friends, he ever tells them the story of the
idiots in the crosswalk, who didn’t have the common courtesy to help someone in
need…Someone who wouldn’t even have been
in need if those idiots weren’t in the crosswalk in the first place. I also wondered
if he braille-blogs about stuff like that.
I still have my Indian Peace Pipe. It’s now worth $135 and
it’s sitting in the attic with the rest of my PEZ collection—my retirement plan—my
stupid dream that occupies exactly two 18-gallon Rubbermaid totes. I think I’ll
hang on to that pipe. I figure in just under a million years we’ll be able to
buy that villa. You know, maybe twenty-year old Rachel wasn’t as dumb as you think.
