Neighbourhood Little Girl
How strange it felt today, as my wife asked the neighbourhood girl “How was my husband’s book,” and she said “I liked the Virgin Mary story very much.”
In the background I hear the grown men working in the park, the dogs barking along the street, the hammering of another worker, inside a neighbour’s house.
Suddenly a great sense of need comes over me, how the small ones rest in the arms of the old, and pray it is for the better.
I think: to-morrow she will learn the prepositions in Spanish, and a few weeks forward, beyond that, dictation, and beyond that questions will be given her to answer—tests! And then her multiplication tables; and so you see within a short time she will grow up, time will take her on this learning rollercoaster, she will have her own destiny, and so forth and so forth, and within all this I will be forgotten.
Here is the boiling point that subdues: what help shall I be to her then? She is like a stream merging into a river. Many lives will wait on her, teach her, gladly and some not so gladly, if I could I would do more.
She says, “I liked the story of the Virgin Mary, in the book, very, much!” And the conversation is over, and she is gone. And somehow I feel I’m back in muddy waters, of which young voices feed off of, and then disappear. The city, the neighbourhood, it’s all a sea, and were anchored in it, sometimes lifted up, other times about to sail, but most of the time on hold.
No: 2704 (5-27-2010)
How strange it felt today, as my wife asked the neighbourhood girl “How was my husband’s book,” and she said “I liked the Virgin Mary story very much.”
In the background I hear the grown men working in the park, the dogs barking along the street, the hammering of another worker, inside a neighbour’s house.
Suddenly a great sense of need comes over me, how the small ones rest in the arms of the old, and pray it is for the better.
I think: to-morrow she will learn the prepositions in Spanish, and a few weeks forward, beyond that, dictation, and beyond that questions will be given her to answer—tests! And then her multiplication tables; and so you see within a short time she will grow up, time will take her on this learning rollercoaster, she will have her own destiny, and so forth and so forth, and within all this I will be forgotten.
Here is the boiling point that subdues: what help shall I be to her then? She is like a stream merging into a river. Many lives will wait on her, teach her, gladly and some not so gladly, if I could I would do more.
She says, “I liked the story of the Virgin Mary, in the book, very, much!” And the conversation is over, and she is gone. And somehow I feel I’m back in muddy waters, of which young voices feed off of, and then disappear. The city, the neighbourhood, it’s all a sea, and were anchored in it, sometimes lifted up, other times about to sail, but most of the time on hold.
No: 2704 (5-27-2010)
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