Watch out for crossing guards

 

Carol Alvarado

    "Did you hear the sirens?" Carol Alvarado asked in a grave tone as Kitty and I presented ourselves at the corner of Center and Cedar in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.
     Sirens? What, the tornado sirens? I did a quick reality check. Is this the first Tuesday of the month at 10 a.m.? No, Thursday, 8 a.m.
     "Two police cars and an ambulance," she explained. "The crossing guard at Cherry and Meadow got hit by a car." 
      I gasped.  A driver had stopped and told her. 
      "He's alright — he was up and walking around," she said.
     That's a relief. We continued talking.
      Mrs. A, as the children call her, is the sort of person you stop and talk to, and I usually do, if only a remark about the weather — grateful for the good, sympathetic toward the bad. To me, that is part of a life well lived: to not be in a rush, the mad scramble that is the default mode for so many, rushing to and fro in their seemingly charmless lives. Better to pause, linger, notice things, talk to people. You never know what they have to say.  

    When we're not discussing meteorological fine points, we often talk about the mad, salmons-to-spawn scramble of the drivers blasting up and down Cedar. Drivers who just don't want to stop. You can almost sense their coiled impatience, being forced to slow down by some guard, just to let these pedestrians pass. She won't even try to step into the crosswalk if a car is less than half a block away because they have a tendency to keep going.
    "Drivers go around me," she said. "Or they don't see me. Wearing this." And she spread her arms out, with her high-visibility safety neon yellow-green coat and hat, and flashing handheld red stop sign. "How do you not see me?"

    After Kitty did her business — "standing on a dime" is how I think of it — I considered heading over to Cherry and Meadow for first person investigation. But I figured the guard was either receiving medical care or rattled enough for one morning without the media showing up too.
    A call to the police seemed in order. Since I'm not in Chicago, the police called me right back.
    "Yes, we had a minor incident over at Cherry and Meadow," said Rich Rash, community relations supervisor for the Northbrook Police Department. "A vehicle turning left with sun on the windscreen, as the truck was turning the crossing guard was right in his pillar. He couldn't see him, but it was a very, very slow turn. The guard jumped out of the way and fell on his back and elbow. There was no contact. He'll probably be a little stiff, but he's okay. The driver was very, very apologetic. He was shaken up too." No citation was given.
    The suburbs get a lot of flack, but we do tend to operate on a more humane scale. I suggested that this might be an opportunity to remind motorists to look out for and respect crossing guards. Sometimes they seem to want to go around the guards, like bulls surging past a toreador. 
    "They do that," laughed Rash. "Everybody's always in such a rush. We want to let everybody know to use due caution and be patient. If the crossing guard is in the intersection, the law is they have to stop movement until the crossing guard is out of the way and onto the sidewalk."
     So slow down. Give it a try. You'll be safer and, who knows, maybe even happier. Because I am not in a rush, after we talked about the accident, I chatted a bit further with Alvarado, 81, who ran an accounting firm with her husband, 87 who, on nice days, sometimes sits in a chair nearby while Carol does her crossing duties. She's crossed children here for six years and plans to remain at the post for a few more, until the pride of our block, a dynamic 9-year-old who happens to be my next door neighbor, moves on to Northbrook Junior High. We both had attended her outstanding star performance at the Northbrook Park District as SpongeBob Squarepants in the eponymous musical. How many crossing guards attend the plays of children they help across the street? Mrs. A. does.
     "My husband wondered how she could absorb all those lines," she said. "And I told him, 'She's playing a sponge.'"
     She looked at me. I looked at her. For a smart man, I can be amazing slow on the uptake. She saw my incomprehension.
     "Playing a sponge," she repeated. "Absorb her lines."
     Ah, I said, laughing, and went on my way, quite fortified by our encounter.