like seeing grandma in a mosh pit

yesterday after work i took the accursed 43 masonic through the presidio back towards home. i was comfortably sandwiched between a dude reading sci-fi and a dude with too many bags when suddenly at the stop after mine my friend who is four got on the bus with her dad. she is in our pre-k classroom and usually has two pigtails. she was carrying a small stuffed poodle. they sat down right across from me and i winked at her but didn't say anything. by the time we lurched out of the presidio and into the richmond she had tugged on her dad and whispered to him who i was. he smiled at me in the manner of all lucasfilm employees. they're a jolly bunch. they got off the bus a few stops before me, but for that whole ride she had this mystified look on her face, which i couldn't quite place until i remembered this one time i saw my kindergarten teacher at the grocery store.

...wait, you live somewhere? you eat? food?

it's mind-boggling to a four-year-old that people move about in space like that, unsupervised, because four-year-olds never do. oh it's so charming i could just bust.

so sure enough today i was called upon by the weather and my superiors to slather all the children with sunscreen. this is an absurd process involving a different pair of latex (or latex free, or powdered latex, or powdered latex free) gloves for each child. the amount of waste produced by a single daycare program in one day would knock your eyelashes off. so there i was in the pre-k room on a kid-sized chair with a growing pile of latex-free gloves at my feet, and my little friend from the bus comes careening towards me yelling: "teacher britta teacher britta i saw you on the bus!" big smile. pigtails falling out.

later she said i could come over to her house and play because she has a lot of stuffed animals. i said all right.