Something must be going on, but I can hardly hear you now

“Easy,” he laughed, with a bit of a stumble into his cell phone. “I’ve got one more meeting until 5 o’clock and then I’m free.”

The young man paused outside the back door at Central Middle School in a T-shirt, long polyester athletic shorts over black leggings, and lime green shoes. Maybe a Phys. Ed teacher.

Shortly thereafter, with every bit of late afternoon winter sun still clinging to the mostly white trunk and branches of my casual friend Bill’s large sycamore tree, I walked through the alley toward South Park.

I easily had been imagining along the way that Mr. Lime Shoes had been talking to a young woman, impatient to see his face, his encouraging voice just not quite enough for her.

As I approached the gazebo, I saw a small group of students – four girls and a couple of boys – who had likely been just hanging out there on the deck, catching what remained of the sunlight.

To my puzzlement, an older African-American man, still young to my eyes, about Mr. Lime Shoes age, slight of frame, appeared to be lecturing them. The kids listened attentively. He was dressed casually, although that did not preclude him from being a teacher, but the skateboard he leaned against the railing suggested otherwise.

He wore an earring which flashed in the low-angled sun and a baseball cap. He used his arms with some vigor as he talked.

By this time, I was sitting on a metal bench across from the winter-silent Roosevelt Fountain and I could only hear bits of talking sounds over the more general hum of the passing cars on Mass Street.

One of the girls raised her hand as if she were in class. The man in the cap acknowledged her, and then shortly, she and two girl friends descended the steps of the gazebo.

The first girl, wearing a pink jacket, was talking into her cell phone – as I recall the phone had a kind of lime green sleeve around it, as if that means anything. The girls - young women, perhaps I should say, it’s hard for me to know anymore - approached the bench where I was taking notes about apparently anything.

No one but me seemed to notice.

Two of the girls walked on, and the one with the phone went back, up the steps of the gazebo, and rejoined the other listening kids.

After several minutes more, the man with the cap picked up his skateboard and left, halting partway down the sidewalk, as he was heading away from me, and then he, too, stopped and was talking to someone on his cell phone.

Now I don’t have a cell phone, and as you can see, I followed almost none of the actual conversations I observed. From where I sit, a nondescript older man, I can hear the swings squeaking from the playground on the other side of Mass.

Maybe I’ll wander over there and see what all that racket is all about.