Roberta Umor, Yuma Sun  

9 October 2020: Yuma, AZ — The police were armed. Fire fighters were on call. Hospitals cleared their Emergency Rooms. The media were visible everywhere—reporters on foot, cameramen atop their broadcast vans, and helicopters buzzing above.

Downtown Yuma looked like a war zone.

When the long anticipated news arrived, and everyone in this tumbleweed town knew the Bulldozers had swept Reno and advanced to the second round of the PEBA playoffs, the lid blew off: young people poured into the streets, confetti spilled from building tops, beer flowed in the gutters.

Behind their nifty new riot shields, police advanced on the raucous crowds. They cordoned off side streets and pushed the crowd toward the intersection of 1st and Main Streets in Old Town. The crowd resisted, pushed back against the advancing line of police. The noise rebounded off the brick and cement buildings downtown until no one could hear anyone. The police couldn’t hear the Captain’s orders, the mob couldn’t hear the police megaphones, and the fire fighters handling the huge hoses that pulsed with the force of water waiting to wash over the resistant mob couldn’t hear the police.

Police Chief Beatrice gave the order to deploy the hoses, but no one heard it. The hoses didn’t spew, the youth didn’t disperse, the police line didn’t move.

The stalemate held for one moment … and another …

Then, far above the din of the crowd came the sound of a tinkling bell:

Tinkletinkle … Tinkletinkle.

A moment later young people on the periphery of the crowd were amazed to see a yellow bulldozer plow its way down Main Street, tinkling as it came, with Christmas lights like a halo around its top and a sweet aroma escaping from its exhaust pipes.

Tinkletinkle … Tinkletinkle …

The crowd ceased to swell against the riot cops. Police paused in their push to contain the crowd. One bright officer opened a path for the tinkling bulldozer and as the strange vehicle crossed the police line, the crowd of youth parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Cries of “Anna!” and “Free food!” filled the air.

The strange bulldozer crawled to the center of the youthful crowd and stopped. The passenger door of the dozer opened and out popped the tiny figure of Anna herself, formerly of Anna’s Mexican Food and most recently the proud new owner of Anna’s Roving Mammoth Burritos Bulldozer, a theme-based food truck.

The crowd roared its approval. Anna held a megaphone. The speaker attached to the top of the bulldozer-cum-food truck screeched and scratched until Anna called out, “Free food! Dozer win! Anna celebrate!”

And with that the side panels of the dozer fell open to reveal Anna’s kitchen helpers, their hands filled with little white balls which they proceeded to toss, like baseballs at the ballpark, into the outstretched hands of the hungry mob. Their mouths open in anticipation of a new delicacy from Anna, their hands reaching into the air for one of the white balls, the crowd turned its back on the police in their shiny new riot gear and poured all their attention, all their energy, all their youthful hope into grabbing the balls that arced through the night in Old Town Yuma.

Catch! … crumble 

Splat! … crumble 

Clutch! … crumble 

As each ball found the outstretched hand of a Yuman Being, it exploded into a hundred tiny particles leaving the lucky ball catcher with nothing but a few grains of rice.

Rice balls!

Anna had brought rice balls to the masses. Tasty seasoned little balls of white rice and garlic and saffron, carefully pressed and molded into spheres by Anna’s kitchen staff.But the rice balls deconstructed themselves upon collision with clutching human hands.

According to newly appointed Police Advisor on Matters Pertaining to Postmodern Youthful Resistance, Jock Derrière, the crumbling rice balls were a simulacrum of the anarchic forces found in all revolutionary movements. “The internal pressures of self-contradiction,” Professor Derrière explained, “combined with the external forces of disambiguation, yielding a frisson of différance without a difference, a destabilized text of rice, and an authorless apotheosis.”

In a word, loose rice!

Only the lucky few in the crowd, into whose open mouths errant grains of seasoned rice fell, ever knew how tasty those little balls of rice were.

The crowd groaned.

Anna’s staff, realizing there was no point in tossing any more of the exploding spheres, turned to their tiny leader for directions. For a moment, disappointment shown on Anna’s face as she realized the balls should have been made from sticky rice! But then she rallied her wits and turned to the business acumen that had helped a middle-age Filipina-Latina thrive for so many years in the Anglo-dominated desert of Yuma.

“Tortillas!” she thought.

“Tortillas!” she ordered.

“Tortillas!” she called out to the waiting crowd as she grabbed a rice ball, rolled it deftly to the center of a tortilla, pressed it nearly flat, and tossed the alien-space-ship-like tortilla and rice ball into the air with a flip of her wrist that caused the tortilla to spin like a frisbee over the heads of the nearest youth.

Someone reached up and grabbed the spinning delicacy, took a bite, and shouted out, “Tortilla frisbees!”

And thus was born Anna’s latest culinary success.

The frisbees flew, the crowd played catch, mouths were fed, and a riot averted. In all, not a bad day for Anna, for Yuma, even for the police, who caught their fair share of tossed tortillas.

Oh yeah, and the Dozers won, advancing to the Alliance Playoffs. Not a bad day at all.