Pickup

The hill to my kid’s preschool is steep and it takes me seven minutes to walk up if I walk fast.

It takes us a long time to get down.

What did you bring me? Sometimes I try to make her guess. She never wants to guess.

So I give her the snack and I put my backpack back on and then I put on her backpack, which looks like a bat hanging upside down, and I’m always holding at least two other things, like:

 the lid to the container the snack is in

 her show and tell item

 a large stack of artwork

 my phone if my pants don’t have pockets

Twice a piece of art has blown away and we’ve had to run into the street to get it. No, three times. She’s always so happy when we get it back.

I remember when she learned about A, the first letter of her name. We were about to cross the street when she shouted, “Mommy, an A!” She pointed down and there it was, the A in LAWTON, the letters carved in the concrete curb. The cars were looking at us like, are you going to cross or what? And I was just like, I don’t know, we found an A.

A block later, she pointed down again, incredulous this time, as if the A was a celebrity she’d sighted. “Mommy, another A!” It was the A in KIRKHAM.

There was another A in JUDAH, and one on a NO PARKING sign, several on some CAUTION tape and one on a scaffold, something about SAFETY. The world was rich with As.

She gets excited when she sees the skaters. Five or six teenagers gleefully bombing the hill together, gracefully curving down the street, the one in front recording everything on his phone. We see them every few weeks.

There was a while when she would break down, miserable. She couldn’t keep walking. Daddy had to come and get her. Once she lay down on the sidewalk and cried so loud and so long that a lady came out of her house to see if she could help us.

There’s a fairy house that she needs to check every day, to see if the fairies are there. Once we opened it up and saw a glossy black pill bug. Aside from that what we see when we open it is the bark of the tree. If we look hard we see traces of fairies. I think I taught her that spider webs are fairy beds, or maybe she taught me that. The fairy door used to have a bell but the bell kept falling off. For a while we were custodians of the fairy door bell, fishing it out of the bed of painted rocks every time we visited and replacing it on its hook, but then it went missing and now there’s no bell.

The fastest way to get down the hill is to play tag or red light / green light. Sometimes I am a kangaroo and she is my joey and I have to chase after her going, “Get back in my pocket!”

The cracks in the sidewalk are lava, hop like frogs, walk like crabbies.

The tree with low branches that she can touch if she jumps.

It’s faster to walk down Tenth but it’s more interesting to walk down Ninth. There are more words to read there, more signs and awnings, more people.

The best way to get her to walk down Ninth is to promise a trip to the grocery store that sells Kinder Eggs. We do not get a Kinder Egg every time we go to the store. “We do not get a Kinder Egg every time we go to the store.” We agree on this before we walk in.

After the store we pass a bus stop. Once, she saw a skater sitting on his skateboard at the bus stop. Skaters are like celebrities to her, the same as the letter A. “Mama, why he’s not skating?” Because he’s waiting for the bus.

Ninth has the donut shop and the bakery. As we walk, she announces which businesses are open and which ones are closed. Open! Open! She likes the O in OPEN.

Pretend the parking meters are vending machines. Pretend we are squirrels being chased by a fox.

A dog barks and she grabs my hand. She loves dogs but she’s scared of barking, a tricky combination. She likes quiet dogs, like the little dog who uses wheels instead of her back legs, another celebrity. We run across the street when we see her, shouting her name.

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Amy Berkowitz is the author of Gravitas (Éditions du Noroît / Total Joy, 2023) and Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019), which was recently translated into Russian. Amy lives in San Francisco, where they host the Light Jacket Reading Series. They’re currently working on two (!) novels. More at amyberko.com.