“Look at this!” A boy, about four years old with clear hazel eyes, a round nose, a broad face, and cropped sandy hair held a DVD case out for me to see.
“Wow!” I answered in a whisper so as not to disturb the other library goers.
I had been watching him climb up the book stand that held a huge open atlas at the top. Just as he had climbed high enough to identify the book lying on top of the stand, his “Mamaw” glanced over at him and told him to climb down.
He lowered his foot, reaching for the ground; he hesitated when his foot didn’t connect with anything. Then he jumped all six inches to the floor.
With a sigh, he plunked down in the chair beside me. I looked up from pretending to study the chemical reactions governing intracellular respiration in my Advanced Biology text book. I smiled at him.
He hopped up from his seat and retrieved his book and DVD from his mamaw. Taking his seat, he set the book down, jumped up again, and walked over to me.
“Look at this!”
“Wow! Have you seen it?”
“No, but I have it now.”
“Which one is your favorite character?”
He pointed to the yellow boxy claymation character on the front of the case, and he proceeded to explain to me how that character got hit in the head by a snowball. Luckly though, one of the other characters was able to fix it. After he explained to me the intricate details of this TV show, he showed me his book. He had picked it out as a “present for Mamaw.”
Being four is so much fun. You can talk to people whom you’ve never met before. Thoughts like, “What are they thinking about me?” don’t even begin to occur to you. You haven’t learned to laugh at fewer jokes because you don’t have a “sophisticated sense of humor.” Giving a gift doesn’t have a thing to do with whether or not the receiver keeps the gift.
Of course, I’d never trade back a single year of my life, but maybe, even while gaining maturity and wisdom, I don’t want to “grow-up…” not in a conventional sense anyway.
The little boy’s Mamaw finished picking out her book and called for him to go.
“Bye!” he waved to me, “My name's Tristan.” He skipped out of the room.
