NOTES ON A SCANDAL

The event was scandalous in several ways.

I’m not one to sensationalize, but we stayed at the empty farmers’ market until almost six pm.

(Anyone knows it’s important to get home for the dessert tantrum at least half an hour before the bed tantrum so you have time for the diminuendos. But we stuck it out.)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We also stole two chunks of broken marble slab from a heap in the grass under one of the stalls. Could barely carry them. I don’t think anyone saw, luckily, it being the case that no one was around.

Things were thrown onto the pavilion roof. I was pretty sure that was not ok, on account of the clattering. I said please no more of that. They did it a few more times.

A shoe was temporarily lost. I found it, but there was a pretty big dangling question mark about what one of them was going to have on its feet at school tomorrow, since it grows out of everything I buy within a few hours, and, for a while there, for all I knew, one of its two remaining fitting shoes was on the roof of the market somewhere.

Listen, bicycles were put on display in places they should not have been. Honestly, I don’t know how they got them up there. It was impressive. I’d have taken a picture but I didn’t want any evidence on my mobile device in case we were stopped. We do dabble in things like J-walking, right on red during prohibited hours, and heads-out-windows farther than seatbelts should allow.

Dead flowers were picked. And put in places they did not belong.

It brought me back to the year they were even smaller and more impossible and would not leave the field of daffodils at the Children’s Garden, just kept squashing them and wreaking havoc on tender stems, and that car slowed and stopped and I thought this is it, we’re going to the clink, and then the guy who got out was just a professional photographer who wanted to take some portraits of my contrarian goblins to use as promos and give us for free, and sure, I said, so relieved I could have peed myself.

Anyway, there were other scandalous features as well. Several stalls at the empty market yesterday bore the weight of rather dense children on their highest shelving without supervision. I had to get my steps in, see, so while I was on the south end, marching towards morally righteous immortality, they were still somewhere in the middle mucking about, and shit happens. I am good at not noticing as I pass if there is no blood.

An adult rode a child’s bike. Maybe more than was necessary. Knees hitting the handlebars et cetera. But there was a dinger bell, and good tires, and it was red, a new red bike, and the kid wasn’t riding it, so.

The two dudes who were the only ones to come through the pavilion while we were there, friends or lovers or business partners who arrived in different cars and passed through on their way out to the picnic table on the dock to sit for a very long and peaceful-looking meet-up, did not necessarily see that there were children at least tangentially involved in what was going down, just that there was this middle-aged person with tangled hair on a tiny red bike with good tires and a dinger bell traversing the pavilion floor.

A child’s watercolor was left behind in a stall that will be used again after a long winter in just a few weeks. The painting is of a cat, and some mountains, and it is unsigned. The vendor who resumes habitation of the stall will have an anonymous watercolor and about forty stems of dead flowers sticking out of all of the holes in their woodwork to contend with. A confused beauty-bomb without attribution will start that person’s April. What I wish to emphasize is that no one knows whither their judgment upon such subjects may travel.

And that’s just it: it is the great unknown-ness of the incident, the prolonged phenomenon of ostensibly bike riding at the empty market long past dinner time (damn the time change to a special hell), that really lofts it up and over some of our previous scandals: there were, besides the two dudes, no witnesses.

We are free, therefore, to know it all as we will, without corroboration. Free to paint the stolen marble with maps, to know silently where the mud on the bike wrench came from, to sit at the traffic light upon our late exit with the satisfied silence of people who did not know what would happen when the chucked rocks clattered down the roof of the pavilion, or the stall shelves bore the weight of the seven-year muscle, or the folded-up parent wheeled by, dinging— we did not know.

And we did these things anyway. Maybe, in fact, because.