What do you say to an eight year old girl?

What do you say to an eight year old girl?

You’re swinging alone on the swings at

New York Elementary School.

Not too high, just slightly back and forth,

slightly up and down.

You have an old man’s stomach.

Kids are running around.

Balls are being kicked,

bounced.

A boy dodges this way.

Another slides on the ground feet first.

A girl’s shoe laces cross over and skip.

They’re making up most of the rules

as they go.

And then you see a girl running towards you.

Her coat is unzipped, 

flapping.

Her hair is flying.

She’s a blur.

And then she’s sitting in the empty swing 

next to you.

She tells you, go higher.

Go higher, she tells you.

You look for words.

You try to tell her,

It doesn’t quite make my stomach lurch,

It doesn’t quite make my stomach queasy,

but it does quite make my stomach uneasy.

She laughs at ‘uneasy.’

Quite.

Then she kicks her feet and swings.

Higher and higher she swings.

Her coat flaps.

Her hair flies.

She’s a blur.

And then you pull on the chains.

Higher you go.

You can’t bend your knees,

the ground beneath your feet is too close.

But you pull on the chains and go higher –

still higher you go.

What do you say to an eight year old girl?

You say woo.

Woooooo.

Woooooo.

Woooooo.

The secret of happiness?

I was walking through South Park on Sunday afternoon. The sun was shining. The temperature was so close to what you would expect near the end of April that you would have to say that it was perfect. It wasn’t windy – to speak of.

But the Roosevelt Fountain wasn’t working as it should. It wasn’t burbling. Maybe it was clogged with leaves or something. And so a middling pool of water had formed around its base. Maybe at its deepest it was three inches deep.

But two little kids were enjoying life as they found it – wading and splashing in the pool. One little girl looked up at me as I approached and smiled at me. “You have to take your shoes off," she said.

I didn’t stop to explain to her that happiness is not as simple as that. Something is clogging up my brain these days and the normal fountain of my mind isn’t burbling the way that it should. I just walked on.

But when you have your health, and you can manage to ignore the climate changing cars spewing their exhaust on Massachusetts St., and you can overlook the selfish folks and their greedy interests in high places, and you can try to forget about the sad cardboard signs along the sidewalk ahead of you that indicate that life is passing some people by, all that may be left for you is to simply enjoy life where you are. And sometimes you will just have to take your shoes off.

It’s not as if we grown ups have much more power than that little girl to make the whole world all right again. We should do what we can do. But then perhaps it’s time for us to pretend that we’re youthful again. We might just feel the feeling of the fullness of water around our toes. We might feel the happiness we can feel in the moment.

And maybe next week, we could venture off the sidewalk and try walking on the green grass in our bare feet. Who knows? It might not be very much happiness, but that little girl probably knows something we’ve forgotten.

You have to take your shoes off.