TWO THINGS ARE TRUE

..and other things I learned from a five-year-old

See this table? This is what I sit beside every morning with a cup of coffee, and I read a poem, and then I sit still for as long as I can (not long, alas) and I try to empty my mind, which never really works, but I try anyway. There is peace in this ritual, and I notice the difference in my day when I don’t do it.

I babysat for my grandson the other night, and when it was time for my favorite part, reading before bed, he elected not to dive into a book in favor of telling me something important. “Inside each of us is an invisible bucket,” he said, and I perked up like a dog with a biscuit held over his head. “When you tell someone something kind, it fills the bucket up,” he said. “But when you do something mean, like laugh at them, or make fun of them, the bucket empties out.”

I believe this is something he learned in school, and I was happy to see that it made a big impression on him. I liked thinking about what he said, and I told him so. Then we read two books out of the three he is allowed every night, and when we got to the third one, an illustrated version of Puff the Magic Dragon, he said, “This one’s kind of sad.” And so it was: His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain…. And Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave/So Puff, that magic dragon sadly slipped into his cave. After we read it, I said, “That is kind of sad, but you know what I believe?” “What?” he asked, and in his eyes was that wide-open trust mix of trust and hope that kids can show you. I said, “I believe that Jackie Paper’s son came and met Puff and the whole thing started all over again.”