The girl with the frizzy hair turned around and looked at me.  “Hi, um, are you listening in on us?”

Somehow I knew that I was busted.  Might as well fess up.  “Yeah.  Sorry.”

She continued, “Are you looking for a job?  Come on over and sit with us.”  How did she know that?

Her group of four Greenies employees usually sat at their own table in the corner of our school cafetorium, next to an all-Muslim table.  Not that the Greenies had a religion, the kids just worked at an alternative grocery store and a couple of other businesses in town.  This foursome at least seemed like a bunch of pretty ordinary kids but they were kind of different at the same time.  I was listening in because I’d heard that Greenies hired kids after school and I needed a real job to help my mom out, not a junk job.

Until then they had been talking a little about somebody or other’s boyfriend, but mostly they talked about, and I’m not making this up, pickles!  These kids were making and selling their own garlic-flavored pickles and they used something called “turmeric” in one batch.  Apparently some of their latest batches of pickles didn’t taste quite garlicky enough.  That’s about the point when the girl turned around.

So, I picked up my tray and came over.  “Hi, I’m Jorge.”  They introduced themselves, Bill, Manny I think, Isis in the blue shirt with the hoop earrings and Beth, the redhead with frizzy hair, who talked me over.

Bill launched right into jobs. “Ok, you’re looking for a job?  I just started on the Greenies hiring committee last month.  We’re looking for kids with math ability, also integrity and we want team players.”

“Well, I got an 84 in algebra last year,” I said.  I didn’t know the first thing about having something called integrity so I clammed up about it.

Bill continued, “You want to meet us over at Greenies tomorrow at 3:00 after school?”  The job interview had gone just that fast!  “No guarantees, but we’ll try you out.  We pay minimum wage but you also earn cred.”

I must have looked bewildered.  “Cred is good,” explained Bill.  “It’s Greenies’ internal measure of how much everybody in the company can trust you to do what you say you’ll do.  Cred gets you places at Greenies.  For example, Isis is on track to go to college, then grad school and will probably become a physician’s assistant at the medical co-op because her family has lots of cred and so Greenies trusts her to do a good job.  In the short term, if you’re earning any cred at all with Greenies you can start to take evening courses in the back of the store.  Three of us have been taking Tae Kwon Do with Mr. Casparian the produce manager, and Manny here has an independent study in entrepreneurship.”  Whatever cred was, it sounded good.

Bill continued, “Final test.  Beth is taking an elective in ESP.  Beth, what do you see in Jorge?”

Beth, the girl with the frizzy hair, spoke slowly and with pauses in her sentences.  “Oh, I think he’s -- going to be a good worker.  Also, I’ll just throw this out for what it’s worth, but I’m getting a reading that Jorge is going to be a United States Senator someday.”

- - -

Senator Jorge Pickles looked in his elevator car’s mirror.  Yes, despite his thinning silver hair he looked every inch a senator.  As the elevator doors opened he slid his hairbrush into its drawer in the car, then he walked out onto the platform.  He walked 30 feet across the platform to the subway car in front of him.

The Washington Metro’s Silver Line subway car sitting in Vienna Station was packed with at least 60 or 70 seventh graders and 6 teachers, all of whom had started polite applause as soon as they saw Senator Pickles coming.  They kept applauding as the car doors shut and the train started to accelerate.  Jorge shook as many hands in front as he could reach.

They accelerated out of the station.  Now the Northern Virginia landscape flew by, a trailer truck pulling a large boat down interstate 66, the bicyclists in the breakdown lanes of I-66, the stores and office buildings up on hillsides, the trees.  One of the teachers, an older woman in a pantsuit, restored order with a fairly loud voice, “Kids, we have a limited amount of time with Senator Pickles.”

The kids quieted immediately and then an athletic-looking student got her first question in like lightning.  “Senator, is your name really Pickles?”

“Yes,” said Jorge.  “I used to be the spokesman for a pickle company.  One night we were joking around, and somebody said that if I changed my last name to Pickles we’d get more sales.  So I did it, I changed my name to Pickles.  Now, are any of you reps?”

Two students and one teacher raised their hands.  Student reps only get 1/10 of a vote, but their rep votes still count.  Jorge looked at the closest student rep.  “I’d humbly like to thank you for choosing me as your Senator for the past eight years.”  It’s always nice to thank people in this business.  Jorge had gotten 98.9% of the local rep vote within the State of New York last month, garnering about as much influence as any Senator in the whole Senate chamber.  The November New York Senatorial election was nothing but a formality.

A short, freckled girl spoke up, “How did you get from pickles to the Senate?”

“It helped a bit that I was a spokesperson with national recognition, but really I worked and I sat through an awful lot of committee meetings.  I was a spokes, that’s what they called reps then, back when we were just a group of co-ops and B-corporations.”

“That’s when the government was nearly bankrupt and all of our companies kept picking up millions of new people and growing.  Everybody needed a steady job and some people were effectively disenfranchised from working anywhere at all, so in time the co-ops took over the economy.  Then the movement ran me for the New York State Legislature, and I won.  Then I served as Lieutenant Governor, and then as U.S. Senator.”

Several kids jumped right in with more questions.  Seventh graders tend to pay an enormous amount of attention to national legislation when their own votes count for something.  It seemed amazing how the kids coming up were nothing like kids back in Jorge’s high school.  Jorge’s generation was terminally shy in front of most adults over 30 years old, perpetually seen but not heard.  “Senator Pickles, Senator Pickles, how do you feel about turning the House and Senate into ceremonial chambers?”  The Metro train dove into the blackness of a tunnel.  The subway car’s lights popped on.

“Well, I think it’s time.  The House and the Senate haven’t seen any real legislation in four years now.  We’re just rubber-stamping whatever legislation comes in from our various committees.  Five years ago we had one lone Independent in the House who actually debated issues on the floor of the House all by himself, but we haven’t seen that lately.  Nor are we likely to ever see it again.”

“Did you ever think about being a real senator and taking over the government?”  Some kid with a bushy haircut and plastic framed glasses asked the question.  Most kids didn’t wear glasses anymore but a few people wore them for retro style, using plain glass lenses.

“No, never.  Really, I’m just in this position as a service to my country.  Tomorrow morning I’ll still be a United States Senator in name and I’ll still have my office in the Dirksen Senate Building, but really I’ll be nothing more than a glorified tour guide.  That’s fine with me.  The real power always rested with the co-ops and companies.”

The train decelerated into a rather cavernous Capitol North Station.  All the kids rose as one, kind of crowding the door but also leaving a corridor for Jorge to go first.  Jorge still had to lead the school through the Dirksen Building, then over to the Rotunda, walking backwards as he talked about 250 years of American political history.  In the afternoon, the big ceremonial bill would come to the Senate floor, the last real legislation that would ever be passed by the United States Senate.  In the evening, a farewell to the government party would be held at the White House, not a huge affair but more than nice enough by Washington standards.  And then another sun would rise, and ceremonial Senator/Docent Jorge Pickles would once again hold court with another 60 students.  It would still be a great job.