Everything

It's Monday, July 14. It's a hot day, one of those when they issue weather advisories and urge people to stay inside during the hottest part of the day, but we are out in the street. We have to be -- I'm leaving in two days and have to finish a few errands downtown. D&Z, schoolless and free, are happy to tag along. They don't seem to mind the heat but out of precaution, we're equipped with hats, water bottles and thick layers of sunscreen. Oh, and Orbit blueberry chewing gum, for Z and me; D says it makes him feel nauseous. 

The bus stop in front of the building is a parched desert, empty and unpromising; any reasonable creature has found a shelter from the sun. The electronic board at the stop lists only one bus, due to arrive in 6 minutes but we largely ignore it. These boards seem to live a life of their own and invent convenient narratives which often have nothing to do with real time and real life. They are there to give you some manner of hope in your daily movements, if you let them. But the bus arrives when it arrives; anything else is decoration. We retreat to the meagre shade provided by the building behind the bus stop, where we will wait as many minutes as it takes. What to do while waiting....? Then someone -- I don't know who, one of the kids -- says we should dance to the funky-cute music of D's phone ring tone. The excitement is palpable: how could we think of doing anything else at this moment when the sluggish particles of the overheated air are sitting oppressively on our heads with no bus in sight?

I dig out one of my two phones, the one with the local SIM card, and dial D's number. In the few seconds of radio silence fraught with anticipation while we wait for his phone to start ringing -- we are half a meter apart but the signal is surely travelling hundreds of kilometers -- there is a ceremonious feeling in our little group, as if something of vital importance is about to take place and we are about to make history. The wait is a second or two too long for D's liking and just as his face drops disappointingly while he's looking at his phone, it pings into action and the eagerly awaited melody spills over the concrete and tiles of our temporary refuge. The whimsical and nonchalant notes drop around us like pearls and create instant magic. As if their activation buttons have been pressed, D & Z spring into an uncoordinated but cutely synchronized happy summer dance, the kind you would expect to see -- if you had any sense at all -- behind a bus stop, on a hot Monday, with a bus allegedly 6 minutes away.

I'm filming it with my other phone because I know I'll need to remember this for a long time, forever and after. The plain and perfect happiness of this moment is unmistakable and almost generates its own halo around the dancing kids. In a second, the only things that matter are right here, and they are ours: their summer sandals (black for D and white for Z), their hats (his is blue, hers is white with a red ribbon on top), his pearly teeth and cool moves, her jumpy long hair and white skirt with red hearts, the friction of sandals against the floor, the circles and diagonals which they are dancing, the beating of my heart, the summeriness, the playfulness and above all, the happiness. The unselfconscious, uncomplicated, down-to-basics, full-to-the-brim kind of happiness, the very spark of life-energy, so natural and easily accessed by children and so evasive and difficult to tap into later. 

The moment is infinite -- until my adult voice disrupts it and pragmatically warns us that we should keep an eye on the bus situation. Then we are back in the sticky heat of the day and its tasks, but with the leftover sense of elation. The bus arrives, overcrowded; we manage to squeeze in and are instantly sucked into the human vortex of agendas, attitudes, incompatible horizons. The quirky ring tone melody, however, has lodged itself into the most secret recesses of my soul and it is safe there. I know it'll pop up in my head unexpectedly at random points in the future: as I am turning an uneventful corner, or observing the rain-bearing clouds from the balcony, or standing in a line somewhere. Next summer we'll all be different and might never do a dance like that again; but I'll whistle the melody in the years to come, and it'll uphold my world with happiness, freedom and closeness of that July Monday at the bus stop - and that's something. That's everything.