Each Saturday the little boy and his father come in for hot chocolate and a cookie. We speak to each other through drawings. “What shall we talk about today?” I write. He thinks, holds the pen up to his mouth, lips pursed. “Mountains,” he prints. What makes mountains?” I ask. It takes me a moment. I’m deciphering the word he scrawled. “Love?” No. “Lava.” His father laughs and says, “I think I want him to tell us how love makes mountains.”
Midway through Story Time, Sophia and Amos are pumping their outstretched arms in rhythm to “Hickory Dickory Dock” and the mouse is going haywire running up and down the clock, flying off at 2 and then joining with a cow and cat, and they’d put any beast in the song if we had time, and we keep laughing at how the beast’s dismount. Their faces shine.
At the fountain we make wishes. After they press the magic stone over their hearts, they hold it before them and say, “Wish into stone!” When they drop them into the water, I swirl it and say “SHASH!” They follow my hand spiraling up, out the window, and up, up, up above the sky. “Your wishes are in the first star you see tonight,” I whisper. They are looking up and silent and then smiling and their parents are laughing. They want more wishes.
Children protect us.
In their innocence, they promise an alternative to the corruption and brutality of this American moment. We want to believe that good people will make a difference, and here, among children, is the next chance for that to occur. In their splendid curiosity, they form a kind of covenant with rationality — they ask question after question — follow-ups, tangential inquiries, and free associations that prompt us to ask questions. They are thinking in ways un-ensnared by ideology, by bigotry, by bias, by idiot conspiracies, all those vices now smothering this place and time. Their fears and creations are those of children — mythic, not the poisonous halfwit stories too many American adults tell themselves.
In all of their virtues, but especially in their joy, children protect us from monsters. They sweep us up in the present and remind us that the core of life at its best is love and the life force. Good parents give up freedom and personal comforts to raise children and then shoulder decades of anxiety about their choices, absences, mistakes, failures, but those anxieties are also a form of mission. This I must do well good parents must say again and again about their raising up of babies to be adults.
In all of their virtues children protect us from monsters, and this present America is swarming with them in the persons of cynical pols, predatory billionaires, fanatics, dupes, mass killers, the cult of Trump, the cult of the gun, the cult of wealth, a life-destroying espousal of a brutal kind of machismo and an amusement with cruel spectacle that makes the pleasure taken in the Gladiatorial Games look mild.
Yesterday, a friend at a gathering of writers said, “I cannot imagine cleaning up the bodies of children.” We had been talking about the murders at Uvalde. We could just as easily have been talking about all the dead children of these 23 years since Columbine, — the dead children in schools and on city streets, gunned down with malice or by gangbangers settling scores in a heedless spray of bullets, shot while playing, shot while huddling in a corner of a classroom or bedroom, shot while grocery shopping, shot while attending a party, shot while walking along in the sun.
We have become a country that values gun-violence over children. Their deaths have been factored in to an American political and economic equation. Their murders are the cost of doing business.
