Friday, September 15, 2006

Little Women

At the coffee shop yesterday, a young girl proudly sat down in the big green cabbage of a chair next to me. Her three younger sisters and mother sat outside with their chocolate milks, sipping straws, telling their mother of their day at school. But inside the shop, legs crossed beneath her, with a small lidded cup (to make it look more adult no doubt - although it was still probably just a lukewarm cocoa-) this young girl sat smiling to herself. Unbeknownst to her, her mother watched her through the window, as the other daughters milled around her like fuzzy ducklings. Such beautiful children. A blonde, a dirty blonde who already hinted of the brunette to come, and a striking red head whose locks nearly seemed alive in balmy breeze, dancing like algae.

The sisters would come into the shop occasionally; to impart some detail of the traffic going by or snippets of conversation outside, but the girl brushed them off nonchalantly. She had a book in her hands that she held like a proclamation. She seemed proud. Was that it? Proud of the fact that she had this new book to read? Of drinking in words privately. A book chosen on her own for no other reason than enjoyment? Or was it more excitement? Like Proust's Madeleine’s -- to remember the excitement of being ten, eleven... with the ability to transport yourself into other worlds. A driver’s permit of sorts, years before a more tangible form of transportation would feel crucial. Her gaze hiccupped from her book almost mischievously. As if she was meeting a boyfriend excitedly after only a few dates, when everything was new, new, new and dewy and full of promise.

When she went outside, she handed the book over to her mother, who put it into a canvas bag with the other daughter’s books -- a collage of picture books, chapter books and other more puerile selections. She smiled at her mother shyly. Her mother's eyes beamed back through opaque sunglasses. Her eyes, of course, were not visible to me, but her cheekbones betrayed her love and pride for her child. It was as if she'd watched her daughter like the long-ago Kitty Hawk pilots experiencing the first few titillating lifts of flight. How it made me long to sneak a peek, just a tantalizing glimpse, of the day when I will venture out with my daughters, and in the same manner, look at them and marvel. What fantastic wonders await? I wonder. I wonder.