little kids

There's a young family that belongs to the same church as I do: the man, his wife, and their two kids, a girl of perhaps 4 and a boy who is not quite 2.

The man comes early every Sunday morning to check on the soundboard and make sure the mikes are all working right. His wife and the kids come a bit later, right before church. She sings in the choir and the little ones go to the nursery.

I saw something today that made me smile. The mom brought her kids in, and the dad came walking out of the sound-system room just to say hi to her and to make sure everything was right. The little girl saw him (they couldn't have been separated for more than an hour) and she said, "Daddy!" and ran up to him and grabbed him around the knee (he's a tall man). The little boy kept reaching out until his mom put him down, then he ran over to his dad and stretched up his arms, wanting to be picked up. His dad picked him up, and then said, "Okay....let's go to the nursery now" and led them out gently.

Those little simple moments, a family being a family. Oh, I'm sure there are times when the kids are cranky and the parents are tired and everyone wants to yell at everyone else, (But I don't see it in that family; they always seem to be content when I see them).

Seeing the little kids - the girl in particular - reminded me of my own early childhood. When you have good parents, how easy it is to trust. When I was little, I thought my mom was the most beautiful and the most talented woman in the whole world - she could sew and knit and crochet and make toys for me and bake and cook and grow a garden and she knew the names of the birds and the bugs and she could sing and she could make me feel better when I skinned my knees or the bigger kids in the neighborhood made fun of me. And I thought my dad was the smartest and strongest man in the world, that he could fix anything when it broke and he knew the answer to all of my questions.

And while I still esteem my parents highly, I don't have quite the same blind admiration I had as a kid. And while I realize it would be impossible to hang on to that as an adult - and it probably isn't even desirable to - still, I kind of miss that feeling, that feeling of being able to trust another person totally and 100%. Of them always living up to your image of them.

And I thought about two other things: when did this feeling change? I think, reflecting upon it, it changed after I went to school. Part of it being in and around other people, but a bigger part realizing that there were some things my parents just couldn't protect me from (I was teased a lot in school; I got knocked down a lot in the halls. And though the teachers were more attentive than what you hear in some of the horror stories from schools today, they still didn't always manage to stop things or prevent things). I began to learn that grownups were falliable - some played favorites, some pretended not to see stuff that happened, some even lied to you.

And I also got to thinking this morning: I wonder if about the time I learned that grownups weren't as perfect as I thought they were, if that was when my mental image of God started to change. When I was a kid, I had the typical kid mental image: the old, old man with the long white beard, sitting up in the clouds. But after some of my school experiences I began to realize that that image didn't work for me any more.

Now, if you asked me to describe an image of God, I'd be hard-pressed (well, at least for God the Father). I'd probably hem and haw and say I saw God as something like a Force (not The Force, although in the original Star Wars movies - the ones that came out when I was a kid - the description of the Force comes sort of close. I did not like that "midchlorian" thing they introduced in the "prequels that came later" movies. I liked the more non-material, mystical, non-reductionist version of the Force). But it's hard for me to really conjure up an image, while it would have been easy as a kid.

I don't know - just thinking out loud here. Sometimes when I see a little kid I'm briefly reminded of what it was like - the dim and shadowy memories of my own childhood, and I wonder a little at how I got here from there.