Two kids, one gone

“We need a filter,” said my shrink on my last visit.

We were talking about the news, which—I know, this is dog bites man!—is horrible. The city of New Orleans is under meteorological attack, the Republicans are doing whatever they do, and the news in Puerto Rico?

Well, front page of The New Day is about the death of Lorenzo, a ten-year old kid who saw something he should not.

And who died an hour or two later.

Today, I’m the filter. I read as much of the story as I could. Anyone reading Spanish can do so as well.

But I don’t advise it.

It’s a curious thing, our morbid interest in these affairs. The senseless killings, the misdeeds of the rich, the random violence and the shattered lives.

Let me tell you about another kid, also ten years old.

Her name is Naia, and she’s totally cool. And she’s the daughter of a lady named Lady and a French man. Lady is a poet, her husband is an artist. But that’s not how I met them.

For seven years, I was constantly seeing and talking to people. I was awash in a flood of 500 people. There were faces everywhere.

Then, I was alone in an empty apartment.

Well, the first thing, of course, was to do the trot. Get outta the house, see people, say hello.

But the trot only lasts an hour….

OK—what to do? Put myself on a schedule. After the trot comes the post. Then lunch and Sudoku.

Right—but the afternoons?

Then came the heat wave, right after we returned from Britain. And solitude and heat don’t make a pretty combination.

So I did what a lot of guys without jobs or with too little work and too much time do.

I made a café my office.

Worked out well, too! They make a good sandwich, they have excellent coffee, and the Internet works.

And there was air conditioning, as well….

And then I noticed Naia. She was busy being home-schooled in the back of the café by her mother, the owner of the café (as well as poet).

“What’s the capital of Oregon?”

Remember state capitals?

Of course I do. What I didn’t remember, of course, was the capital of Oregon. So I waited for the answer.

“Portland?”

“Try again….”

“Umm—give me a clue?”

“It starts with an s.”

“Springfield?”

Well, I knew that wasn’t true—that’s Illinois. 

I’ll spare you, it’s Salem.

Half an hour later, I passed them—still hard at work—on my way to the bathroom. And of course I had to interrupt.  

“What’s the capital of Oregon?”

Mother beamed at me.

“Salem!”

Naia, you see, is completely convinced that the world is a good place, a gentle place. A strange guy can enter her classroom, ask her a follow-up question, and of she answers. No fear!

“OK, so what’s the capital of California?”

That one was harder, but she got it—Sacramento.

Well, yesterday it was multiplication. Six times eight?

Naia blinked six times, and responded correctly.

Right, each blink was an addition.

So I explained a useful trick—ten times eight is eighty, eighty divided by two is forty, add the additional eight and you get 48.

So we played with that for a while.

For reasons that I cannot understand, little girls like me. 

“Tell me a story,” Raf’s niece once said. We were waiting to get off a cruise ship and were bored. So I told her the de Maupassant tale of the horribly, horribly good little girl whom everybody adores. She gets eaten by a wolf at the end.

“Now you tell me a story,” I concluded.

Well, she bested me immediately.

“There was once a little girl who lived in an island of puke and her brother lived in an island of snot….”

So I’m not surprised when Naia comes with her pet dinosaur and tells me about it. She sits uninvited at the table. We chat, until I shoo her away. I ponder, at times, what life as a father, rather than uncle, might be. And I marvel how kids, now, effortlessly juggle their own childhoods and the intersecting lives of adults. Much better than I did, as a kid….

Oh, and guess what?

There was only one Lorenzo. But there are millions of kids like Naia.