Yesterday afternoon I had set off on Route 460 in rural Virginia, going from here to there, as one does, when I pulled off the road into this little oasis of an Exxon gas station. It was another hot, humid day in the South, and there weren’t many people about, except for this one car on the far side of the gas pumps. A woman walked across my lane into the convenience store where, according to the cardboard sign, they served some of the finest fried chicken in the county. An older lady got out of the car to pump the gas, and a little girl, perhaps all of seven years old, climbed onto the metal railing at the end of the aisle of gas pumps.
I noticed that the girl, wearing a white dress with little blue flowers and kicking her heels back and forth on the railing, watched me with intense brown eyes as I got out of my car. I didn’t think anything more about it, until about midway through filling my tank.
“I think your hair is pretty,” she said.
Startled, I looked up at her. She smiled at me, a little shyly. I connected the dots and realized that the lady who went into the store was the little girl’s mom, and her grandmother was the one pumping gas. While the mom and grandmother were Caucasian, the little girl’s darker skin tone and her kinky, ginger brown hair, which spilled down to her shoulders, suggested she was mixed.
I smiled back at her. “Your hair is pretty, too.”
Her smile widened.
About this time her grandmother, a hard-looking lady, charged around from the other side of the gas pump to see what strange man was talking with her granddaughter.
The grandmother glared at me, then looked at her granddaughter, who was grinning like she and I had just shared some super secret.
The grandmother turned back to me, hesitated, and then her face softened. “I’ll bet your hair is longer than mine,” she said.
When I think about that little girl and what she said to me, I am touched. But then I am saddened when I look at the news and I think about how the world, over time, can change people, turning them about, confusing their minds, making them clench their hands and stomp their feet. Make them lose their way. Make them hate.
And so I call out to the universe and ask that the little girl can hold on to her precious attributes of friendliness, openness, and innocence for as long as possible–using those natural and pure reactions, thoughts, and emotions as a shield against the toll of growing older.
And I wish we all could carry that same shield, even if just for a moment, so we can remember what it was like to look at the world through her eyes.