Why do children do the things they do? Perhaps we might better ask, why do we stop being children at all. It is a terrible thing, the death of a child. So much is lost. So much that might have been. But oughtn’t we mourn the death of the child inside each of us, when the fullness of time buries our innocence in a tiny grave? Is growing up so very important, that we never miss the tender heart we once felt beat within us, or glistening eyes that sparkled with simple wonder, now glazed with Knowledge’s pain? Windows once so clear our soul danced within them, till Time’s arthritic coda bid it hide, a sedentary widow.
There are some strange entries in my baby book, things you might find odd. But to a child they must have been truly special, like a prom to a teen once thought plain. It says there passed a time when I preferred the taste of earth to Mom’s aromatic cuisine. A time when, spoon in hand, I ventured to a certain spot in the yard, and relished eating – dirt. Funny thing, I remember. The taste is still on my tongue, the smell still in my head; warm black earth (clean earth, from a special place), savory and satisfying. My mom and doctors both at a loss, they thought perhaps it was something lacking in my diet. And prescribed delicious chocolate vitamins to quell my odd desire. But I would have none of it; and Mom ate them instead. The entry in the book makes my new family laugh still; I taught my infant brother to eat it as well.
Why is TOS so important to me? Why do I still crave it so? It is a taste unlike any other in the world, a moment frozen in time where faith and hope and characters of warmth dance in my mind still. Something I cannot find on this new plate we call the mini. A need yet to be fulfilled. What I cannot find inside where knife and spoon and kerchief bid me eat conformity.
And so I take my spoon in hand and venture still, outside where waits the saporific delicacy my heart, still young, still craves. My spoon is now a pen, my meal a dream. But somewhere in this bowed and graying frame, each passing day a drop of innocence and hope disturbs an inner pool, where faith’s reflection plays a trick of light and shadow, BSG as young and true as this one’s heart remembers it.
Affectionately and respectfully,
Muffit
