i love watching mothers and little children

I love watching mothers and little children. I believe that there is nothing that is more beautiful, especially in context, than a mother with her little child.

She will be walking in the store, talking to the child, maybe even asking it questions about various vegetable choices or sale items, as if it really understood.

Of course, by talking to the child like that, she is preparing it for hearing real things, for listening to real language. There is nothing worse than talking baby talk to a child. It needs to hear real words.

In fact, studies show that the more you talk to a child like a real person, the more the chance that the child will grow up to have greater intelligence.

I also love to see a child and have it see me. Today, I was waiting for Ella to have her haircut in the mall, and a mother came by pushing a little bitty girl.

I saw her about the same time she saw me. She was looking at me in that way that only little children have. So I wiggled my mustache. I can do kind of the same thing with my upper lip that Samantha on Bewitched could do. Only with a mustache, of course. She couldn’t do that.

The little girl watched in amazement. That was the most amazing thing she had ever seen. No one had ever done that before. Then she screwed her mouth and tried her best to replicate the gesture. She couldn’t, of course, but then her mother took her away.

I love to see a child like that. It is a moment between me and the child alone. Nobody else. The child, more than likely, will not remember it, except as part of the visual fabric of the day.

When I saw her later, you could tell she remembered me but didn’t know why. She had seen too many other astonishing things in the interim.

Children see so much that after a while the look on their faces almost resembles astonishment more than anything else.

Can you imagine seeing new thing after new thing and then off to the next? One thing after another, moving along as if on a life conveyor belt. The child become somewhat calloused after a while. It just sits and watches. It is still all astonishing, but it becomes a spectator.

When I went to Germany in the army, I felt like that. And I had a little understanding of what it was like to be a child, unable even to read the signs for the bathroom. I would walk and look, one new thing after another.

Of course, I had a framework to put it in. I also had a certain gift for languages and could, after a time, figure out some of the signs. After all, it doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out that toiletten and toilets are the same.

But a child has no contextual framework. Everything is new, and because they are being pushed along at someone else’s speed, everything is equal.

Brand new people, ready to learn and take their place in the unending line of humanity. And my mustache plays a little part.