A Boy At My Table
I’m seated at a table at the mall, deep in thought, trying to write. This is my usual, not the mall part, exactly, sometimes it’s a café, sometimes a restaurant, but the rest of it is always the same: me, a half-finished line, and the search for a better sentence than the one I’ve got. Nadia’s Theme is playing through my AirPods. If you’ve never used music to prime yourself for creating, give it a try sometime. You’ll be amazed what it shakes loose.
While I sit there contemplating the next sentence, a boy plops down across from me. No more than eight. Not directly across, more catty-corner, off to my right. He sets his device down on the table, leans in, and disappears into whatever’s holding his attention. He has no idea who I am. I’m not sure he’s even registered that the table he’s chosen is already occupied by a stranger. To him I’m furniture, part of the room. He just sat where there was a seat.
The innocence of childhood is a fascinating thing to watch up close. That total ease, sitting down at a stranger’s table without a flicker of hesitation, not because he’s brave but because it hasn’t yet occurred to him to be otherwise. The world hasn’t given him a reason. I’m fifty-nine, and I can’t remember the last time I sat anywhere without first reading the room. Somewhere between his age and mine, we trade that ease for caution. For some of us it’s just the slow work of getting older. For others it comes from something specific, something that taught the lesson hard. I watch him and I can’t quite recall what it felt like to not yet know.
And then it hits me: I was that boy once. I had that same innocence, that same obliviousness to the room.
The easy thing to tell myself is that mine was a different kind. That it was the seventies and eighties, a different time, a safer one, that innocence simply came easier back then. I almost believe it. Then I catch myself, because, or was it? Maybe every man my age says exactly that about the years he was small. Maybe it was never the era at all. Maybe it was just being eight, the same eight this boy is right now, in his own time that he’ll grow up to defend someday the way I defend mine. The innocence wasn’t the decade. It was the age. I’ve probably been giving the seventies credit for something that just belongs to being young.
He looks up now. Glancing around, searching, for a parent, a familiar face, something to anchor to that he can’t quite locate in the crowd. For a second the ease is gone and he’s just a small boy who’s lost track of his person.
Then a woman approaches, and she’s familiar to me too. I know her. We met in a class in college, thirty years ago now. She’s this boy’s mother. I’d call it coincidence, but on a small island of a hundred and sixty thousand, it really isn’t. This is how the days go here. You’re forever running into the same faces, friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, the people whose lives keep quietly overlapping yours whether you planned it or not.
And there it is, the thing I didn’t expect to find. The boy looked up searching for a familiar face and found his mother. I looked up at a stranger’s child and found someone I’d known three decades ago. Both of us, the eight-year-old and the fifty-nine-year-old, discovering in the same minute that the room is smaller and warmer than it felt a moment before. That there was never really a stranger at the table at all.
Maybe that’s why God sat him across from me. To help me write these few sentences. To remind me, on an ordinary afternoon with a song in my ears, that the distance between who I was and who I am is shorter than I think. I came looking for a better line. The boy brought me one.
