My Watercooler

To be perfectly honest, I’m happy to say, that our journey to Southern California was completely uninteresting.  We made it to the bus no problem, we got off the bus no problem, and got on the train no problem.  In fact we were doing so well that when we were getting off the bus a woman standing on the sidewalk waiting to get on offered to help, and when I responded with “No thank you”, she said, “Yep.  You look like you can handle it because you are a woman.”  Strange thing to say, but still, we did just fine.  August was a prince on the airplane, and that was it.  I won’t bore you with the details of how we didn’t sleep over the weekend because August decided he didn’t like his bed, the room, his sleep sack, the night-light, or for the first time ever Zebra or Bunny. No, really, I’m not going to bore you with it. Instead I’ll tell you a much more interesting story.

I took my six-year-old niece to the playground over the weekend.  We were having a great time playing on the see-saw, teaching her head stands, practicing our cartwheels, and her showing off on the monkey bars.  All of the sudden, right after our fifth successful head stand, I notice that she stops, turns to the right and stares.  I look over to figure out what she’s looking at, and before I figure it out, she turns to me and says, “I’m going to go play with her, okay?”.  ”Sure.”, I say totally dumbfounded and feeling a bit neglected.  But I got over it quickly because I was dying to see how this was going to play out.  My niece goes over to this girl who looks about the same age, she says something, I’m not sure what, and the next thing I know they are crawling around in the grass pretending to be cats.

After that grows old they play on the slides, chase each other in the grass, and practice their head stands. For the next thirty minutes I sat there on a park bench wondering why it’s so easy for her to a make a friend and so seemingly impossible for me.  What was her opening line? It must have been some line.  They were really having a great time.  It was like they met at the playground every day after school.  I was so jealous, why can’t I make friends like a six-year-old?  Why do we as adults make it so difficult?  Is it because our tastes “mature”?  Is it because we learn more about what we like and don’t?  Whatever the reason, we should learn from kids.  Every kid is different, but they don’t seem to mind their differences, so why should we?

In that thirty minutes, they had a wonderful, and there was not one fight.  At the end my niece said to the girl, “Well, I guess I’ll see you some day.” The little girl innocently replied with “Okay, but I’m only here on Saturday and Sunday because I go to school the other days.” Then my niece with a surprised tone said, “Wow.  Me too!” She was surprised to learn that someone else goes to school during the week.  It was so great.  Their innocence was one of the most hear warming things I have ever witnessed.  I turned to my niece as the girl ran off and asked her what the girl’s name was.  She didn’t know, so she called out, “Hey what’s your name?” She turned her head as running up the hill, and said, “Julianna”.

Beautiful.