I met a girl today. I had just decided against sushi and walked into Aroma di Roma for a working/reading dinner alone, and an impossibly cute, waist-high waif entered just as I was setting my things down at a window-side table.
As I approached the counter, the girl asked the owner for pen and paper, but all he had handy were receipt strips Since I’m a real writer and so never travel sans notebook (sometimes a laptop just doesn’t fit the bill), I walked outside to the table where the girl stood (next to three seated adult-types, not a true waif after all) and offered her a couple of sheets. She answered shyly in the affirmative. “I want only…two,” she said, which I provided. “That is really sweet of you,” she said, using exactly that phraseology, no older than 7 if she’s a day.
The pleasure I got from the exchange was a bargain-and-a-half, and I returned to my table in better spirits than I had left it and began to perform some freelance editing. I was at it less than 10 minutes when the girl struggled with the for-her heavy glass door and eyed me across my tabletop. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” she said. “Do you want me to show you what I can draw?”
Her artistic demonstrations quickly turned to conversation after I expressed admiration for her talents (particularly nice was a crescent moon with pursed lips and peduncular star, a lunar anglerfish tempting the universe to come closer), commenting that she was much better at drawing than I am (true). “Are you an artist?” she asked. “Well, yes, but I’m a writer.” “Can I see your writing?” she implored, reaching for my copy of Infinite Jest under the presumption that this was my art. I was half-sorry I didn’t have with me the proof copy of my just-completed novel (never mind that it’s no better reading material for a 7-year-old than Wallace’s).
Her name was Alejandra, which, despite a light but mysterious accent bespeaking of a foreign land (perhaps the place called Childhood), made me suspicious of the tale she spun about being from Egypt, a suspicion confirmed when she reported she had lived there for 130 years. She penned characters that appeared loosely pictographic. “What does it say?” I asked. “It says, ‘Put something in your pocket!'” she giggled, a private joke she liked so much that she set it up with similar scrawls and repeated the punchline five minutes later.
She told me I could become good at drawing if I practiced hard, explaining that this is how Lady Gaga had gotten good at singing. She volunteered to help me, and so began my tutelage: she would sketch a couple of lines, then hand me the pen so I could copy her movements, encouraging all the while. “That’s really good!” she exclaimed at just about every stroke. “See, I think you’re getting better.” All my finished efforts were graded with noseless smiley faces, even the ones clearly undeserving of such kindness.
She decided pretty early on that we would stay in touch and wrote down her phone number (though confessing that she doesn’t have an iPhone — which makes two of us), then requested mine. She drew a map showing the respective homes of her father and mother (they are separated, she told me. They had been to court, and now she spent two days with her father, then two with her mother, the consecutive days with each memorialized by two little circles next to each tiny plus sign meant to represent a house). She drew a picture of her father’s home (where she was staying currently), told me it is on the second floor and that a neighbor lives below, told me that it’s white. She had to go to school tomorrow, she said, but I could go to the house and wait for her outside if I looked at the map and remembered that her house is white. Could I remember?
Two of the adult-types had disappeared, and her father sat on the other side of the glass wall, unobtrusively surveying us. Eventually he stepped inside, and we made our introductions. He informed Alejandra that it was time to go. “But I’m teaching him how to draw,” she said, both respectful and visibly resistant. “He needs to learn.” “Two more minutes, but then we have to go,” he answered, leaving us to our lesson. “What do you want me to teach you?” she asked. I was starving and my meal had gone cold, but I am loath ever to fail to accommodate an enthusiastic child. She attempted to show me how to draw a cat but realized this was beyond her abilities. “What else do you want me to teach you?” she asked. “Please, no animals!” We laughed. “You’re fun,” she giggled, “you’re the funniest alien I’ve ever met.”
We drew efflorescences and double-scoop ice-cream cones with cherries on top; she succeeded in getting me to reproduce her anthropomorphic moon. She looked over my shoulder to where her patient father was gesturing, now 10 minutes after he had retreated outdoors. “I’m going to leave you this paper so you can practice,” she explained. “You can copy it, or [taking a napkin and placing it carefully over our sheet of art-making] you can trace it, like this. See?”
She had tried to write my phone number on a napkin but encountered some difficulty, so I gave her one of my cards. “I’m gonna call you,” she said, considering the little rectangle of cardstock with a precocious seriousness, and then departed. And returned from around the corner three minutes later, again barely able to hoist open the door. She fetched from the tabletop the art-lesson sheet, on which she had written her phone number. “I’m gonna put this in your pocket so you don’t forget,” she said, then did just that.
*
If her father had known me, had seen me with other children, he would never have thought twice about my interaction with his daughter. But I was a stranger, alone, indulging his daughter for what might have seemed an inordinate duration, and so I can only wonder about the dark flickerings of his thought, of what he thinks of a man my age giving his precious child a business card with phone numbers, an e-mail address, “Greggory Moore / words, etc.”
He had walked inside just as she informed me of her parents’ separation, of the custodial arrangements. “You don’t need to share that with everyone,” he advised her with good-natured embarrassment. “Not everyone is interested in that.”
Why did I ensure that Alejandra took with her my correct contact information? Part of it, I think has to do with my aforementioned desire to accommodate childhood enthusiasm. She wanted my phone number, had expressed the desire several times (even if she would likely cease to care once she arrived home), so why not let her have it? (Her father must relate to my accommodative leanings, for he could not have taken more care not to intrude upon our interaction.)
Then there is my focused interest in child — and more generally, human — development and behavior, particularly as concerns language. I sometimes volunteer to watch my friends’ kids not only to give the caretaking parents a much-needed break, but also to indulge my own intellectual curiosity.
Also in play is my appreciation of what seems a childhood instinct: an innocent willingness to engage and accept at face value. Whatever may actually be the case, generally it seems that unless and until it is bred out of them, children have an especial gift for making (or trying to make) known what they want — including whether they want you around — if only you will not preclude them. I find a particular kind of relief in being on the receiving end of this interpersonal dynamic, as I am someone whose personal psychological history leaves me feeling both relatively bereft of intuition in human affairs (no one’s going to diagnose me as Aspberger’s, but spectrums have fuzzy edges) and pretty much completely unwilling to impose myself upon others, a combination that I fear sometimes makes me seem to adult-types a bit aloof or disengaged, whereas with children it seems to play as a receptiveness to the other (a difference in perception that scores as a bit of evidence for “the wisdom of children”).
Mostly, though, I think my giving her my number had to do with possibility. If that sounds creepy, while I will date young, let’s not get crazy. What I have in mind is rather something more nebulous. As Hollywood teaches us with films like the nice but non-exceptional Grand Canyon (appropriately sporting the line, “All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies”), we may be oblivious to when an important connection is made. And just what that connection is or what import it has for whom may not be fully known until it has been played out. (Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”)
And there I was. Even though I had originally planned on dinner at Aroma di Roma, on the drive from downtown to Belmont Shore I caught a whiff of something that brought to mind sushi, which signaled to my enervated self that fish oils would do me good. But while sitting in Sushi Saurus I found the music and server slightly annoying, and they weren’t willing to split the sushi sampler (too much food and more than I wanted to spend) into a half-order, and so I resorted to my original plan and walked into Aroma di Roma for a tuna panino exactly when I did and thereby encountered waist-high Alejandra, who wanted something that in the moment only I was in a position to offer. And the rest is a tiny bit of history, even if it ends there, even if it is of no consequence beyond an encounter two little people (one much littler than the other) enjoyed in the moment.
I think mostly my giving 7-year-old Alejandra my business card was about the business of being open to possibility, to the unknown, to taking the next immediate, positive, embracing step just because one is able. I offered Alejandra the paper because she wanted it. Alejandra asked after the possibility of sharing with me her artistic talents because I had made a gesture she considered sweet. So it went, so it goes. Might that have led to a lifetime connection with her, her father, maybe some more mysterious tangent? The point is that I could not know. And when she clamored for my phone number, I had two choices: No or Yes.
Ironically, the editing work I sat down to just before my little comrade-in-arts interrupted me is a priest’s theodical examination of the Juárez-Chihuahua feminicides: the unsolved, unpunished, unrelenting hundreds of murders committed from 1993 to the present day in that border area just across from El Paso, murders perpetrated against women and girls largely because they are (were) women and girls. We live in such a world.
And up walks this 7-year-old, soliciting a stranger simply because he has given two sheets about what she wants and she perceives him as safe and able to be engaged, a good guess or an instinct that happens to be right. In a world such as this, who am I to resist?
In a world such as this, I think perhaps we need to embrace the positive to the Nth degree, to embrace it and never preclude the possibility of even the smallest good in the tiniest corner of our little lives. I think our best strategic move is to say yes whenever we are able, yes to whatever might move us even momentarily to somewhere better, yes to increased connectivity in our community, yes to whatever we can afford to give, yes to the chance that it might matter, yes to the mystical moments, just yes and yes and yes.