First Day of Summer Vacation

It was the last day of school for the year and we were having a pot-luck party to celebrate the coming of summer vacation. Something about the atmosphere about it felt like high school but the classroom reminded me more of the Russian class I took at Portland Community college; the air was warm and the sunlight filtering through the pollen felt almost syrupy.

For some reason I slipped out of the room to go to the locker room to take a shower, perhaps because I'd gotten food spilled on me. It was just down the hall and consisted itself of a narrow hallway lined with lockers, the showers small cubicles the size of bathroom stalls branching out of it. it was cramped and there was no room for me to drape my clothing on the towel dispenser, it already being covered with another's clothing. The air was thick with steam and the smell of sweat; I made do somehow and took a quick shower in a tiny stall more suitable for being in a motor home than a school locker room. The football team, or some kind of group of burly ass-grabbers, was out in the locker room filling it with a merry cacophony of accusations of gayness and boasts of athletic and sexual prowess.

When I stepped back into the classroom, fresh from my ablutions, it had turned into a small cafeteria or a quick-service restaurant with a small buffet-like serving counter like in Subway. I was alone with my boss, who was a very attractive woman whose features I can't recall other than she was blond; I was even in a uniform that featured a red polo shirt. We were closing the place, she breaking down and cleaning the steam table as I was cleaning the dining area. People occasionally trickled in individually, causing her considerable consternation because we were already behind schedule yet it wasn't quite closing time and so they must be served. Contrary to my nature I was nonplussed and drifted blissfully and almost vacuously, like I was in a trance or still high from a bowl I'd smoked a couple hours ago.

Suddenly I was standing at a bus stop on the corner of SE Stark and 39th. It was still warm out but the sky was overcast and the wind had started to kick up into breezes that felt like the snorting of an excited horse. A couple guys in their forties or fifties — very white and blue-collar — walked down the street past me and crossed the intersection. The older-looking guy was holding eloquently forth on an amusingly irreverent description of the difference between Christmas and Easter, the particulars of which I can't recall; the younger was chuckling. Just as the older man stepped out onto the street he tossed his half-finished cigarette onto the sidewalk. I walked over and picked it up, still lit, to finish it and told him "Merry Christmas" and winked as he turned around briefly, grinning, then continued down the street with his companion.