Deep Pockets

It’s Thanksgiving Day. Well, it will be, in a few hours. It’s pitch-black at 3:00am, and I’m very careful to step quietly through my top-floor apartment, slip silently down the stairs, and shush the heavy security door as it threatens to bang shut.

Bundled up against the late autumn chill, my short little legs have plenty of practice speed-walking the two miles between me and my kitchen. Hundreds of volunteers will pack nearly a thousand full-scale Thanksgiving dinners into bags, load them onto our fleet of vehicles, and deliver them to families in the next ten counties. All week, we’ve been stuffing our ovens with sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce and turkey after turkey after turkey. Everyone’s going to be busy, and I want to get there first, so the second person who gets there will already have a cup of coffee waiting for them. I get such a great sense of fulfillment from my job, I get to work with some of the most generous, kind-hearted people in the world, and I have a bag of teeny-tiny home-made pies slung over my shoulder, because that is how I say ‘thank you’.

The moonlight, jealous of the sodium streetlamps, is silvering the shadows on the slumbering trees as I follow the path through the cemetery. The broad road of yellow brick sweeps down through neat rows of named stones over manicured grass, dotted here and there with tokens of affection. In the middle of a bustling city, the last pearl on the choker of the Atlantic megalopolis, this hallowed space is so serene. So at peace. Shivering in the crisp November frost, my heart is fizzing with exuberant joy.

There’s a figure up ahead. Taller than me—most people are—and swaying slightly, meandering across the road. I put my hands in my pockets and speed up to pass, slipping by on the left-hand side. Our shadows stretch out before us on the sidewalk, a pantomime of where we’re about to be, and I hear it: footsteps pounding up the pavement in pursuit.

He gets a hand on my shoulder, but I twist from his grip, with a full-throated “Fuck off!” to rip through the silence. I can see he’s holding a knife. And, with my hands free from my pockets, so am I.

He hesitates, backing off a little. I keep staring straight into his eyes, dark and wide over his masked mouth, and he has to be a kid of six- or seventeen. He mumbles something behind the mask.

“The FUCK you say to me?” I shout, bucking at him like an agitated cassowary.

He tries again. “Gimme your bag!”

“No. Fuck off.” I turn my back on him and walk away, fast, but not too fast. He does not follow me. I pocket the knife.

I’ve told this story a couple of times, and two things happen when I do. First, people tell me I should have complied and handed the bag over, which makes no sense at all. Doing exactly what I did, nothing happened to me, and I got to keep the bag. I’ve come to the belief that people are actually thinking about what they would have done in the same circumstances, and for their strategy to be right, what actually happened must be wrong. I quickly stopped telling this story because no one will just believe I’m a badass.

The other thing that happens is: I’m asked why I had a knife.

I always carry a knife. I have little ones for utility, wickedly sharp ones for sensitive tasks, and some, like the one I pulled, that are designed to scare the crap out of anyone who needs scaring. I trained as a chef, and know exactly how to brunoise Yukon Golds, butcher a soft-shell crab, or carve a rose out of a watermelon. I worked in a warehouse, which necessitates the use of a box cutter several times every minute, and my team counted on me to always have a spare. And, there is a scar on my side from a time I stepped up to somebody who did not back down. Almost no one has seen it, and if they did, I would lie about where it came from.

There is a reason I have to carry big, scary knives, and it’s because I’m…well, okay. I’m cute.

It's not my fault I'm reluctantly adorable. I’m little, I wear funky shoes, and I always smell like a bakery. I smile and laugh a lot these days, and I have an endless artillery of dad jokes. If I have to write somebody a note, I add a little doodle to brighten their damn day. I give out cookies and stickers to the volunteers. And I’ll tell you something that’s true for all knife-wielders: the bigger the blade, the more they’re trying not to use it. If a mugger comes up to me and I pull out a little baby kitten sticker, they’re going to expect they won’t get hurt. I'd have to prove it. No one will just believe I’m a badass.

Even shouting curses at him, I feel for this little boy, this amateur intimidator with nowhere to be at three in the morning. I’ve had nights where I’ve slept outside. I’ve swayed back and forth on the sidewalk. I’ve had the bad judgment to attack a stranger, and I still have the scar. I’m not giving this kid what he wants, but I hope he figures himself out quicker than I did. When I was where he is, I never had a moment's peace.

I’m not the first one in the kitchen; the lights are already on. I step inside shivering, and my boss has a cup of coffee in her hand. “Hey, you’re here early!” she beams. “I was too excited to sleep. This is going to be such a fun day!”

I put my hands in my pockets, and present to her a little, wrapped, cinnamon ginger hard candy. I always carry candy in my pockets these days, just to give away, and that’s something everyone around me can count on. They never see what else I might be carrying. “It is.”