A Wonderful Episode.

Scene: Status Quo. Calypso's coffee shop, sitting in a good chair, reading, writing, and internet-browsing. a.k.a. "my element of choice".

A little girl comes in with a healthy bounce-to-step ratio, her gait a strange mixture of animated sulk, wiggle, and waft. She just has to be 11; she must be. Her hair is brown, straight, short, and a little messy--almost boyish. Quite boyish, actually. She is holding a green book as if it were something a part of her, so important and familiar that it is negligible. She wears a navy hoody, incredible striped socks, and flat, black, ballet-like shoes. She has terrific, big, dark eyes. She lunges backwards into a big comfy chair, whips her book out, and begins to read with rigor. She is brought coffee by her white-haired mother (the character of their interaction precludes the coffee-bearer from being confused with a grandma), and proceeds to alternate between reading with her nose less than an inch from the book and scrutinizing her coffee mug with curious fascination at a like distance.

Of course, by this point I have stopped reading the very funny article/essay/story (What would you call those things that S.J. Perelman writes? The back of the book calls them both "pieces" and greatest "hits". "Hits" might do the trick.) and am now gaping at her. My principal impulse is to adopt her as my daughter. She is one of three children to inspire this in me. I reflect on both my impulse and the other times at which it has been evoked, and realize that in each case I would ultimately make a better older brother than a father.

I reflect further, however, and realize that this is just what I will be as a father: a notch just above spectacularly older brother. My attitude is doomed to be one of fraternal instruction and dialogue, a categorical and aloof posture of punishment, with god-fatherly, scientific curiosity and interest, without any of that consciousness of the strata of generations; my children cannot help but be little more than lagging peers to me. When you think of the meager amount of maturation that actually occurs in humans throughout their brief candle of life, compared to what must elapse in the forever hereafter yet to be ushered in by the resurrection of humanity, that mathematical "ray" of life stretching indefinitely onward, outstripping civilizations long since petered out, I cannot imagine being anything but a peer to every human still kicking, fruit of my loins included.

Anyway, possessed with a curiosity to discover what her book is, I stand up, ostensibly to go get a drink. Passing her, I say, "Do me a favor?"
She looks up: "What?"
"Murder anybody who touches my laptop. Thanks."

I couldn't glimpse the book. I go to the bar and chat with the barista, A.J.. A.J. is articulate, intelligent, funny, and kind, so I play the odds and assume he was home-schooled. I like chatting with him. As we discuss the naming conventions of the coffee-shop's menu, I recognize his eyes. They are that of the 11-year old. It all makes sense. It's not long until she steps up to the bar and we are introduced. Her name is Grace and she is reading "The Peppermint in the Parlor". I didn't catch the author. She and A.J. are 16 years apart, which isn't a bad spread (and ruins my 11-year old hypothesis). A.J. informs me that they are 2 bookends to 5 children ("a basketball team," he gibes), further confirming my home-school hypothesis. I order a bread bowl of minestrone, which will turn out to be the tastiest minestrone I've ever had (admittedly, perhaps transfigured in taste by my happy thoughts).

Just as I start to write about all this here, I look up and listen to the white-haired mother, who sits at a table of four not-quite "elderly" adults, who are discussing clearly spiritual things, with level tones and laughter. They are Christians. I glow in the thought of these wonderful lives made wonderful by an accurate and wonderful worldview clearly carried out into the particulars of practice and conduct, presumably illuminated by a sound pedagogy centered around sincerity, family, and love.