A Time I Realized I Was Protected

Growing up in a family being the youngest out of all of my cousins and having no sisters it was cool when my older cousin would want to hang out with me. We had strange experiences before but this experience was different. Even though we were a few blocks away from home I wasn’t sure if we would make it back there.

It started when my cousin wanted to hang out with her boyfriend but she needed me to come as an excuse to be outside and look like she was being innocent. She was still a teenager and I was a tweenager (the years right before teenage status) so we had to be back in the house shortly. It was a twisted situation because I was the youngest out of all of them but it would seem like her male friends would always somehow like me and somehow they were trying to put me in situations to want to talk to them. That’s for another story though.

So it had to be around 7pm at night and we lived around the corner from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Ca. It was really my aunt’s house and I stayed there because it felt safer to be there than at my mom’s house. But anyway, my cousin’s boyfriend and his friend pulled up in a little red 2 door car. It was so small that there should have not been any space for two people to sit in the back. The significance of this fact is that the guys were tall and my cousin was noticeably overweight so riding in the backseat of that car was a challenge even if we were only going around the corner to the Rose Bowl. We had to somehow twist our bodies to fit in the back of the car.

We arrived to the Rose bowl parking lot, really across the small street to the aquatic center parking lot and they proceeded to do what a lot of young gang members did back in the day. It is called starting a smoke session. We were stuck in the back of this little car while they got all their stuff together. It was about 15 minutes after arriving that we noticed a car circling around. The crazy part that I didn’t mention is the gang territories were divided by 1 street called Woodbury. The ones that wore blue claimed areas north of that street and the ones who wore red claimed areas south of that street. The Rose Bowl was at least a mile and a half from that street. We were in the car with the ones who wore red. The guys didn’t think too much of it because it was considered their territory (trust me I’m well aware that neither side owned a thing).

The car circled one more time but a little closer this time and one of the guys recognized that it was a guy from the other side. This guy was known to be someone you don’t want to mess with. Honestly the guys with us seemed very nervous and thought that it was going to be some violence. The guys hopped out of the car. We were stuck in that extremely cramped back seat with no way to get out the car. When the tuff guy and his friend from the other side approached the car in the usual manner that others that live that lifestyle would, I really got nervous. In my eyes they began to move their shoulders, arms, hands and legs as the dancers in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video as they talked to each other.

I immediately recognized the guy. He happened to be my next door neighbor’s cousin. He happened to look in the little window for the backseat and noticed me. It changed everything. He knew that the guys really didn’t want any trouble and he saw me in the car so he changed his attitude towards the guys and somehow they all had a smoking session together. There was actually peace among the men. When they were all done they shook hands and went their own ways. The guys immediately took us back after the encounter. That’s when I learned that I was extremely protected from above and that I bring peace to situations.