Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Day Fourteen--Crossing Guard

During the course of my career, I was always willing to do anything to help out in an emergency, except blood!   I had no problem helping out in the cafeteria, answering phones, or whatever might need to be done--just don't ask me to be the nurse.

One day, we were short crossing guards.  Gilbert El is right off of Elliot and Gilbert Road which is a very busy and congested area.  Elliot Road is four lanes and is always busy.     I volunteered to be the crossing guard.  I got my vest on, got my sign ready, and went out the crosswalk--I was official!!  Because of the four lanes, there were always two crossing guards--one on each side of the street.  I had the school side and the wonderful other regular crossing guard went to the other side of the street.  I waited for her guidance as to what to do because she was experienced with all of the traffic.   So she and I each went into the crosswalk with our signs held up and stopped the traffic and there was a lot of it!  The students knew to wait until the crossing guards signaled for them to cross the street.  About 40 students started to cross the street. I was standing in the middle of the east bound lanes with my crossing sign held high when ALL of the students stopped and surrounded me to get a hug!   I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and not hug them but I couldn't hug that many kids, keep my sign up, and not be there for 10 minutes!  What a dilemma!  And you should have seen the looks on the faces of the people in the cars that were stopped!  Anyway, I encouraged the students to move on and that they would get a hug tomorrow.    We finally got them all across the street and I went back to my post to wait for the next group.   Second time out another large group of students came across and the same thing happened!!!

Needless to say, that was my last time for being a crossing guard on a busy street in Gilbert.   I have always tried to figure out if I had to put "fired" on an application, exactly what I would say was the reason--stopping traffic for hugging??????   Anyway, it was so funny and so touching all at the same time!

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