Thinking today of people past and passing through my life. Ghosts of minds recalled by words, and food and weather.
Last week, I asked a three-year-old great niece if she wanted me to pick her up. She reached her arms up to me and nodded. She hardly knows me, this blond-curled moppet. But she knows that I am family and I had held her mother many years ago. It is the little one’s birthday.
Later that same day, as I am about to leave, another great niece from another niece shyly takes a taco chip I offer. She looks exactly, exactly as her mother did some thirty years ago. She studies the chip, she is so tiny far below me that I feel a giant to this two-year old. She looks up at me, eyebrows squinched together, eyes large and round, and starts to sing. Together, slow and somberly quiet as if it were Ave Maria, we sing three rounds of Happy Birthday. I realize she must have missed the cake and candle time when others sang too fast for her. She smiles finally, turns and walks away.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology