Hi-C and Calamine Lotion

It was on a Monday I sat,
late for work, in a pediatrician’s office,
waiting for my immunization records.
How awkward to sit with mothers and children,
sick and crying, with wet diapers,
waiting for the prognosis of the latest
sandbox plague.
I should have made an appointment
or had the doctor fax them.
But there I sat, watching sick school children
play Pokemon or whichever non-educational craze
swept their elementary schools this week.
One child stood alone.
I watched him play with a plastic multicolored abacus.
His mother hands him a juicebox,
green and yellow like Slimer from Ghostbusters.
Although it appeared a gallon in his hands,
he took control, wrestling the wrapper off
the red straw.
How innocent he is, not knowing that straw
will earn him detention in later years
when he learns the arts of spitballs.
He came toward me and I asked if he could do a tumblesault.
But he bashfully returned to the leg of his mother,
his perch to sit and wonder, perhaps,
why he cannot talk to strangers, or perhaps,
how the green elephant on the wallpaper
got chickenpox.