When I got home today, I noticed Mr. and Mrs. First Floor’s two-year-old son sitting all by himself in his car seat in his parents’ van. He was sitting very quietly, but looked pretty subdued. I had to walk past him on the way to the apartment door, and just as I was about to pass him he turned greedy eyes on me and started kicking his feet nervously against the car’s bench seat under him and making that whiny, moany voice toddlers make when they want something but don’t want to ask.<\/p>\n
I would have walked on past him, but he was just sitting there, the van door open beside him, all alone. So I walked over to chat with him until one or the other of his parents should see fit to come out and keep their own child company. I really couldn’t see how any parent could just leave him sitting there for minutes on end… but then I haven’t understood much about either Mr. or Mrs. First Floor.<\/p>\n
While babbled mostly incoherently about a cat he’d seen and hearing a train he’d heard earlier, I tried not to think of Mr. First Floor boasting to my neighbors that he makes Mrs. First Floor pay for things (like their new van, which Baby First Floor was now occupying), but that he makes sure everything gets signed in his name only. It just makes me sick to hear them fighting and hear him threaten her with immediate dismissal or abandonment, “and then see how you like it when you’ve got NOTHING.”<\/p>\n
I must have stood there with Baby First Floor for at least 10 minutes before his father came out. (I might mention that the First Floor’s live at the back of the apartment building, and the car was parked in the front, so there was no way of keeping an eye on him.) In that time, I got a headache from the fumes the car gives off, and I noticed that he had car oil smeared on his hands and back of one ear. I also noticed that he wasn’t buckled in at all. He could have gotten out at any time, and he knew it, but he didn’t even try.<\/p>\n
What a good little boy. What poor parents. I don’t know whether to cry or yell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I got home today, I noticed Mr. and Mrs. First Floor’s two-year-old son sitting all by himself in his car seat in his parents’ van. He was sitting very quietly, but looked pretty subdued. I had to walk past him on the way to the apartment door, and just as I was about to … Continue reading Sitting in an Open Van<\/span>