(Sarita speaking) My uncle Clarence was a cable car operator in San Francisco, and he had a glass eye. His family nickname was Frog Legs.
One day when I was riding with him on the car, it popped out. Frog Legs says, “Oh, hell.” The eye poised there on the floor for a moment–we were sitting in the middle of a cross street, flat, blocking traffic. Frog Legs had to ease the cable car forward. The eye started rolling.
“Get it!” he hollered. He was sensitive about it. I always thought he was afraid he’d get fired if the city knew he had only one eye.
Crouching down, I began to hop between the passenger’s legs. The eye would bop off one passenger’s shoe, glance off a lady’s high heel, pause against a man’s brief case, all like that. I hopped after it, dodging calves, to some considerable protests, but I never could catch up with it. Just as I grabbed—poof!—the eye would carom off. I felt like I was in a crazy game of pinball, and for sure losing.
Way at the back of the car, between a Chinaman and an elderly black woman, I dived, dirtying my blouse, and got it between my fingers. Desperately, I got my feet half under me. Just then Frog Legs topped the hill and launched the car on its downward hurtle. The Chinaman looked at me like fate, almost smiling. I spilled over onto my shoulder, and the eye flew from my fingers.
Back toward the front of the car it rolled, bouncing off shoes like pinball cushions, me right behind it like a frog—HOP! HOP! HOP!–never quite catching up.
The cable car swung to the right, around a corner. I swung to the left, into an old gentleman’s lap, or at least against his bony knee. He was wearing a straw boater and a carnation. He was so mad, I thought he was going to stuff that carnation up my nose.
I hopped again, and the eye jammed under the arch of a woman’s high heel, and an expensive-looking heel it was. I put my hand on the vagrant eye, and then I looked up. A very elegantly dressed blonde, she was, and a looker–in an generation she might have been one of William Randolph Hearst’s mistresses headed for a rendezvous.
Now the painted part of the eye, the iris, had been rotating up and down, up and down. When it jammed, as fate would have it, the sightless iris was pointed straight up her skirt. The blonde looks first at me, like I was something she’d stepped in. I drew my hand back. Then she saw what direction the eye was pointed. She gave a high little yip, like a terrier, and she crossed her legs real tight, like vines wrapping around each other. Then another yip, and a “Shoo!”
Frog Legs stops the cable car. He walks back, and he’s just tall enough to face her chin to chin.
I hand him the eye.
She yips.
He fixes her a baleful, one-eyed glare.
She puts her hand to her face in false, blushing modesty.
He rolls the eye around inside his mouth to clean it, then pops the eye back in.
She breaks into a terrier titter of yips.
“Milady,” says Frog Legs, “concern yourself not. The eye sees all, but it does not tell.”
Love your tale. LOL
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visit me at http://www.sandysays1.wordpress.com there are some I’m sure you’ll get a chuckle or two.
Beautifully done. Memories of rocking and clanking on my way to get an Irish coffee. xxoo