She is of medium height and slight build, with hair that refuses to take orders from a barrette. She talks softly and hunches her shoulders, the kind of little girl who hides behind others in school pictures.
Her parents have stopped at the Kroger store in Delhi Township, where a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals mobile unit is parked, hoping to find homes for adoptable animals.
She has fallen deeply, quickly, fully in love with a fuzzy black something that appears to be part Chow, part mutt.
Two days earlier, her parents bought her a beeper for her birthday. She produces it from a pocket. She wants to trade it for the dog.
I do not know her name, but I can still see her face, as her parents force her back into the car, make a wide arc around the parking lot and drive off from her barking, wagging new best friend.
She has tears in her eyes.
She is holding the beeper.
How often we give our children things they do not want, I think, watching her go. How often we deprive them of things they need.
It is a painful thought, especially in the wake of a holiday season when many of us have filled our children's lives with still more gadgets.
It is easy to throw discretion to the wind and our children into the arms of canny advertisers.
Let them have a Tickle-Me-Something. It's one thing to cross off our list. What would we get them otherwise?
Sometimes we don't know our children well enough to choose better. It is a small tragedy that we want our children to be smarter, slicker, hipper, but we care so little that they are happier.
A beeper?, I say to the little girl in the Kroger lot. Why did your parents buy a beeper?
I don't know, she mumbles, as her younger sister, perhaps 7, extends her hand with her own beeper. I guess so they can call me when I'm at a friend's house or at school. But we're not allowed to use the phone at school.
She looks down at the beeper, as the puppy on a leash feverishly licks her hand.
I guess they're supposed to be cool, she says.
Cool is fine for Olympic athletes, brain surgeons and pink lemonade, but children are surely meant to be warm.
They are meant to be the freshest and boldest among us. Able to make fun out of nothing. Willing to try anything once. Unaffected by etiquette, appearance or status.
Genuine. Pure-hearted. Whole.
So, foolishly, we've taken to buying them things that make them look cool.
We fill their stockings with books of genius facts that children from a past generation would have been brave enough to call boring. We buy them games designed for kids at least five years their senior.
We seat them at the dinner table with place mats that teach them French and multiplication facts.
Why waste those precious seconds before dinner on conversation? These kids are on their way to the Ivy League. And they are missing all the useless, tail-wagging, finger-snapping, double-daring, bubblegum-blowing fun along the way.
It is still there, but down a different road, and in a place they can only go once.
That place is called childhood, and it has almost disappeared from the late 20th century landscape.
We do not know the way there, but they do.
They do, if we let them go.
If we let them find the path themselves.
If we do not offer them our directions.
If we do not beep them home too soon.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
RAMSEY ARCHIVE
