WEE
WEE
At the grocery store
my son sees a little person.
A woman, in a long
puritanical dress
with brown hair
and an oblong head.
I notice her from behind before he does.
They are the same height
but different shapes.
I direct him toward the juice aisle
in hopes that he will walk right by
without her catching his attention
as dramatically as did the fantastically obese woman at the planetarium last year
and the man in the specially designed
wheelchair the year before that.
But he is far too observant now.
He is nearly five.
And fit with his own set of burgeoning ideas on the world.
So, as expected, he stops,
turns,
and his eyes widen
as if for the first
time he has just discovered a superhero
flown down from a distant planet
and stood
right here in line
right here with the rest of us.
“LOOK! DAD! LOOK!”
He exclaims, in the only register
that could match such a discovery- loud, loud, loud
“LOOK AT THAT LADY!”
And, as expected, I tug at his arm
pulling him away
from a scene
that she probably sees
every day
on an hourly basis
and is far less concerned about than I.
Childern doing what children do.
Half shuffled, half dragged
yelling louder and louder
he is whisked safely out of ear shot
to a small well-baffled cove of whole grain breads
and fancy corn muffins.
All the while he tries, quite frantically,
to convince me that I have in fact
just turned a blind eye to the greatest spectacle he has ever seen.
That we might still be able to see it,
if we just turn back,
just go look…
“She was a woman! But she was SMALL! Like a kid!
But old! LIke a lady! She was like… twenty one years old!”
And I take a breath,
to keep from laughing,
then I tell him
about the rules
about pointing
and feelings
and manners
and exclamations
and public space
and the different shapes and sizes
that people come in.
I do not
exactly believe the rules
as I tell them to him
but when talking to children,
young children, there are sometimes black and white paths
and sometimes grey.
I do not go into the specifics of her story
as I am unfamiliar with
her condition-
Dwarfism? Stunted growth?
Genetics?
Those are not things for him to understand
right now
and I am not qualified to answer them.
But even so he takes them well,
the facts and rules,
with very few questions of his own
about her age or ability.
And soon his focus is back on
his juice, his cheese sandwich and
his handful of crackers.
And we find a seat in a comfortable booth.
And ten minutes later,
an elderly woman
sits next to us
and he asks her
“Hey! How come your face is all squishy?”