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.
