Do You Know Kiki?

Last week I found myself in line at Office Depot with a seven-foot long snake skin draped over my arms, waiting for the laminator to heat up (a phrase I would have previously bet any amount of money would never be uttered by me), feeling antsy at how long I had been standing there, arms outstretched and held high to keep the skin from dragging the ground, when a woman and her young daughter joined me.

The girl, who could not have been a day older than four, was wearing a dirt-stained t-shirt, a rainbow-colored tutu, and a pair of cowboy boots that had stomped through their fair share of mud puddles. Her hair appeared to have been, at one time, braided neatly but now had the feral look of a dog’s fur after it has held its head out the window on a long car trip. The child seemed utterly unperturbed by the curtain of hair falling from the braid and obscuring her view.

While her mother was talking with the employee about her copying needs, the little girl caught sight of what I was holding and her eyes widened as she took a step closer to her mom and poked her in the thigh. Startled, Mom looked down and then her gaze followed her daughter’s pointing finger over to me. Reading the question in her daughter’s gesture, Mom replied, “You can go talk to her, but don’t touch anything!” Without hesitation, the girl approached me, and, stopping a respectful distance away, asked with a nod of her head to indicate what I held, “Is that a snake?” “It sure is,” I replied. When she asked where I had found it, I told her that my dog and I had come upon it on one of our daily walks. “Ohh. Were you scared?” I admitted that the sight of a seven-foot-long snake-shaped object stretched across the path did startle me, and that I was very happy the skin’s former inhabitant had kept moving along.

“Well,” she began with a giggle best described as carbonated innocence, “Last Saturday when I was at KiKi’s house—do you know Kiki? (I told her I’d not had the pleasure)—I saw a lizard that was this big (arms held at the length of a good-sized house cat to demonstrate), and I touched his tail and it. came. off! Then Papa came over and snatched it up like this (in one swift motion reaching down and plucking an invisible gargantuan tailless lizard from the floor). Mommy, will you come take a picture of me beside this snake and send it to me?” Mom, thanking me for chatting with her daughter (although it was more like bearing witness to an impromptu monologue), asked if I’d mind her getting a picture of her tutu-and-cowboy-boot-wearing dynamo with me holding the snake skin vertically beside her. Of course I didn’t mind, I told her, and after the photo op the child thanked me, as did her mother, and they were on their way to purchase the purple glitter glue the girl had held tucked under her arm while we chatted.

Watching them walk away I thought of all the little girls I’ve taught over the span of decades, and even the kind of girl I’d been. Knowing how experiences can sometimes cause a child (regardless of gender) to lose their curiosity and confidence, I hoped that this one would remain as tuned in to her world, as incandescent as her glittery tutu, as unabashedly herself, forever. I regret to say that I’ve encountered students whose attitude of disregard and ennui seems to have persisted, unchecked, for years. What I regret to say even more, though, is that I’ve encountered far too many young people whose timidity and uncertainty keep them lingering on the sidelines of their own lives. I’ll surely never encounter that little girl again, but I’m going to keep fingers on both hands crossed that nothing about her life makes her place more attention on well-coiffed hair and matching clothes than on jumping both cowboy boot-clad feet into each new day, encouraging the rest of us by her example to do the very same.