My Best Friend: The Crossing Guard

The crossing guard and I are famously great friends.

For more than a year, we’ve seen each other almost every weekday morning and afternoon. He is a squat man, probably around 70, with a weathered face, a bright neon yellow vest, and a stop sign. I am a skinny man in my early 40s with a weathered face, athletic shorts that are gray, black, or navy blue, a Green Day or Beartown Hockey t-shirt, and no stop sign. We are like “The Odd Couple” if “The Odd Couple” were a TV show with almost zero dialog or interaction between characters.

It’s not fair to say that we never speak or acknowledge each other’s existence, but it is fair to say that we only do so sparingly. Sometimes we’ll go days without more than a “good morning” or “thanks” passing between us. When I’m walking my bike across the street, I often contemplate sparking up a more in-depth conversation about, well, something, but when I start to open my mouth, the crossing guard is often standing there, his stop sign held aloft, his other hand outstretched, staring off into the distance as if he’s searching for something. Like he’s missing a piece of himself, and he needs to find it.

I look around, craning my neck to follow his gaze, and by the time I snap out of it, I’m across the street and the moment has passed. Anyway, I don’t think I could ask him, out of the blue, what missing piece of his soul he’s constantly searching for down these suburban streets lined with towering pines, thick carpets of grass, and winding walking paths. We are famously great friends, but we know nothing about each other, so diving straight in with a deeply existential question seems too forward. It could also be that his eyesight isn’t great. I don’t feel comfortable asking him about that either.

When we do say more than “hi” or “thanks” or “no problem,” approximately 100 percent of our conversations are about the weather. This caught me off guard at first, not so much that someone would talk about the weather, but rather, the crossing guard’s unique timing and delivery. One day, after we didn’t talk for about three to four weeks, I was pedaling my bike home in the morning after dropping off the kids. The crossing guard was leaning against his compact SUV, stop sign dangling at his side, and he suddenly shouted, “MIGHT GET SOME RAIN TODAY!” I was so stunned I almost fell off my bike in the middle of the street where I almost certainly would’ve been plowed into a bloody pulp by one of the cars or trucks that drag race through the school zone. Luckily, I was able to stay in the saddle and keep the bike upright because that kind of mess would’ve looked terrible on the crossing guard’s résumé.

I doubt anyone even noticed my slight wobble, because I seamlessly turned my head and shouted back over my shoulder, “WE COULD SURE USE IT!”

And just like that, our friendship blossomed like a wildflower after a drenching rain. (We didn’t actually get any wildflowers that day because it didn’t end up raining, but even that crushing disappointment couldn’t dampen our mood.) From that day forward, about once every ten times we crossed paths, one of us mentioned the possibility of rain, the lack of rain, the need for rain, or for a few glorious days back in the late spring, just how much rain we’d been getting. Buckets, we said. It was like buckets of rain. Oh, how pleased we were. The other nine out of ten times we crossed paths, we continued to ignore each other completely, but the shift was palpable. The air almost crackled with an electric current of connection every time we didn’t make eye contact.

At the end of last school year, overcome with emotion about our imminent parting of ways, I purchased the crossing guard a Dunkin gift card and placed it inside a thank-you note. I had him pegged as a Dunkin man rather than a Starbucks Stan, and if anyone would know his preferences, it would clearly be me. I smoothly handed him the envelope as I crossed the street on the last day of school. He said, “Oh, thanks,” slid the envelope into his pocket and then we never mentioned it again. It was objectively the perfect human interaction.

When school resumed a few weeks ago, I was worried the crossing guard might be gone. There tends to be a fair amount of turnover in the crossing guard biz. But on that first morning in August, there he was. My other half. We didn’t talk to each other for three or four days because we didn’t want to burn through all our conversation topics right at the start, but one afternoon during the first full week of school he held up his stop sign to shield his eyes and asked, “Is it hot enough for you?” I said, “Someone needs to turn on the AC,” and we didn’t laugh because we didn’t need to.

From there, everything went according to plan between us until a couple weeks later when the wheels on the crossing guard’s car almost fell off when he arrived at his post one morning. Had that happened when he was going down I-95 doing 70, the crossing guard posited, “I wouldn’t be here right now.” We both grimaced a little, letting the gravity of that sink in. Because he had left his phone at home (it was a new one and he forgot to charge it so it was “dead as a doornail,” or rather, as dead as he might’ve been had he been zipping down the interstate when his wheels fell off), I let him use my phone. It was literally the least I could do. Unfortunately, we didn’t get very far because he didn’t know anyone’s phone number. However, the police were already there somehow, and since everything seemed to be under control, I went about my day.

That afternoon, the crossing guard was back at his post as he always is except for the first day of early release at the end of each semester when he inevitably forgets the kids get out at noon. His broken car had been cleared away at some point in the intervening hours and an aging sedan whose roof paint was holding on by its fingernails was parked in the grass near the crosswalk. As I approached the street, the crossing guard pounced. His eyes lit up like fireworks. I had never seen him this excited about anything except for the one time a minivan slowly crept through the intersection while kids were crossing the other direction and the crossing guard barked “HEY!” and pounded on the van’s passenger side window.

“They showed me the part that broke in my car,” the crossing guard said, his eyes two black pools of simmering rage. “I just had it replaced two months ago and it snapped right off. It was made in… China!” The last word was spoken with such force it pushed me back about half a step. But that was nothing compared to the violent upheaval of my whole world crumbling around me. I quickly did some mental calculations before settling on a response. I went with, “Oh man.” I briefly considered saying, “Isn’t pretty much everything made in China?” but I didn’t feel like that would get me anywhere I wanted to go. 

At any rate, he quickly moved on, and began reminding me about how he could’ve died a fiery death if he’d been on a different road (this time he used State Road 436 as an example). I was too exhausted to play along again — there are only so many times you can imagine someone’s death before it gets boring — so I just squinched up my eyes and made my mouth into a small O, making it look like I was stuck halfway between a whistle and a grimace. I don’t know why I did this, but I was probably still reeling from the implied racism and my world being flipped on its head.

We returned to our comfortable silence the following morning, which is easy with the hum of the morning traffic and the uncontrolled chaos of many small children moving from place to place. Afternoons are quieter, however, so I made my way back to the crosswalk with trepidation. It was the Friday before Labor Day weekend, and I didn’t want to talk about his near-death experience or his car. And I definitely didn’t want to talk about manufacturing standards amongst our geopolitical rivals. When I approached the crosswalk, I looked both ways and crossed the street on my own. The crossing guard has an innate understanding that helping me cross when my kids aren’t with me is emasculating. He usually turns his head and lets me cross stealthily, clinging to a small fistful of my dignity. I love him for it.

I saw him standing there, leaning up against the street sign casually, trying to act nonchalant like he hadn’t spent his whole day thinking up a one-liner that would set not just me, but the entire earth on fire. And as soon as my sneaker touched down on the curb, he unleashed.

“I can already smell the barbecue from this weekend!” He said it with an undeniable sparkle in his eye. In fact, he could barely get the words out before his own rolling laughter consumed him.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

“I hear that!” was my response. I didn’t say that out loud, of course, but I certainly thought it. Instead of responding, I just laughed along with him. His laugh was soulful and cleansing. Mine was fine, I guess. Nothing to write home about. Probably a little nasally. We laughed like nothing else mattered. We laughed like we were the only two people in the world. Sometimes we do need to laugh. 

In this crazy journey called life, laughter can allow us to forget our differences and reconnect.

So we can be famously great friends forever.