200-word observation

On the southeast corner of Rindge Avenue and Yerxa Road in North Cambridge, Diane Alicarde has stood sentinel for the past 25 years. Since a friend told her she should check out the job, Alicarde has been the crossing guard at this busy intersection, giving safe escort and friendly greetings to kids, parents, dogs, and young professionals scurrying to school and the neighborhood T and bus stops . Behind her is the solid brick, single-story Peabody Elementary School, once called the Fitzgerald, where her five children, three boys and two girls, went from Kindergarten through eighth grade.

"I was doin' daycare from my home just aroun' the corneh," says Alicarde who now lives in Woburn with her retired husband in a two-family house. In the apartment below lives a son, his wife, and daughter. Alicarde and her husband look after their granddaughter while her son and daughter-in-law work. She and her husband are Italian, and on Sundays they cook big family dinners.

"Before I took this job," says Alicarde, "I asked my Mum if she could watch the kids while I came over here for an hour in the mornin' and an hour in the afternoon. I've been comin' here ever since."

"Mornin'," says Alicarde as she steps off the curb and raises her white gloved hand to let a tall dad and his small son cross the two-way street. Some kids with large backpacks strung across their shoulders take advantage and also run across while the cars are stopped. At 8:30 in the morning, Rindge Avenue is busy. With her one raised hand, Alicarde has stopped two lanes of traffic. Lined up and waiting for her signal to pass is an SUV, several sedans, a painter's work truck, a yellow school bus on its way to the horsehsoe curb in front of the school, and a city bus traveling east on its way to the nearby bus stop.

Alicarde has a small compact frame. In her padded black regulation parka, she is more round than tall; her face dwarfed by the white flaps-up cap pinned in front with a silver badge. Out from under the fringe of cap fur and her crop of short wiry gray hair, crow's feet crinkle around her gray eyes. The "Traffic Supervisor; Cambridge Police," patches stitched to both arms of her parka declare she is official. Five years ago the city issued neon green vests. Printed in bold black letters across her chest is the word TRAFFIC.

When on the corner, Alicarde is hard to miss.