She’s a ray of sunshine in her own, spastic, messy, turbulent way. At eight years old and a wiry 40 pounds, my little neighbor “D” never ceases to make me laugh. Or cry. Or hold my head in anxiety.
Yesterday we spent the day together, but unlike some days, it ended poorly. Her mother is a disaster. I just don’t know how D will make it to her 18th birthday. Or her 9th for that matter.
It began, like many good things, with a mess. While I tried to find places for the two of us to go hiking, D decided to color with the set of kid-type oil pastels we gave her months ago. She takes the large sticks and smears them into colors all over pages that usually say things like, “I love you,” “I’m sorry”, or “Our day at the bich”. Meaning, our day at the beach.
Shortly after I found the location she sat down next to me.
“I colored the grass all different colors.” I smiled at her pixie-like face and the drawing of the rainbow-colored grass.
“Cause when grass gets wet, it turns all sorts of colors you know.”
Of course.
Then:
I look down at her white shorts. They are now the color of the multi-colored grass. Oh crap. So I tell her to go wash them off. She does. Then promptly pulls out her bottle of apple-scented anti-bacterial gel and squirts it all over her shorts.
“Cause crayons got germs too, ya know.”
I guess I know now....
A few minutes later she found a shoe cleaner bottle with an attached scrub brush. She sat on the porch scrubbing her shoes, “This thing works really well on shoes…” she said. As I return from throwing away trash I noticed she had moved on from her shoes to her shirt. Vigorously rubbing the large plastic, now brown-with-shoe-dirt scrubber against her chest, she adds “And it’s pretty good on shirts too.” We then had to have a discussion about why shoe cleaners are not multi-purpose items.
That didn’t stop her from making the apple hand-sanitizer a multi-purpose item, however.
While I load up the car, she decides to pour the gel all over the kitchen table….her shoes…basically anything with a surface. Somehow, in a matter of seconds, the white shorts are now brown again. Everything smells like apple, and is, unfortunately, just a bit sticky.
We get to the location where we were going hiking, hoping that a 50 foot waterfall would be at the end of the trail like the website said. Instead we find a vast canyon full of large, hot, boulders. And weeds. Lots of weeds. At one point, as were scrambling through the brush (attempting a “short cut”) in between the high ridges of a dirt-walled canyon, I realized, ‘if someone wanted to store a dead body somewhere, this would be a prime location.’ Just as I’m thinking about D and I bound, gagged and slightly dead in a bush somewhere in this god-forsaken semi-wilderness I hear her say:
"Don't worry about us gettin through this, I have to put up with this stuff every day.”
What? I'm crawling on my hands and knees through what looks more like a deer-run than a "secret" trail, like D claimed. I stop to listen to her.
“Yeah, all these weeds and hikin’…I sure know my way around cause I go fishin here all the time with my dad.”
I stared at the dry-as-a-bone ground and squinted, not sure how to respond. It was then that I wished I were the therapist instead of my sister.
D’s dad has been dead for over two years. And she certainly doesn’t go hiking through dry riverbeds and dusty canyons every day to catch….is she kidding?....fish.
One of the first things I read in the paper today was “Hizbollah Declares Victory” over the potentially tenuous ceasefire brokered by the U.N. Meanwhile, Bush declared, according to Reuters, that: “Hizbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis".
Maybe D isn’t the only one who sees things just the way she wants to. I know she isn’t. I can listen to the completely erroneous things she says and think to myself, ‘you’re a compulsive liar and need to learn how to speak the truth!’ Or I can brush it off as child-like innocence gone a little cock-eyed.
What I can’t seem to dismiss is the fact that even in the silliest things she says, there is sometimes a bit of truth if it is put into the proper context. Grass does look like it turns different colors when light glances off the water and seems to change the shade. Maybe crayons do have germs. Maybe tables ought to smell like apple hand sanitizer.
She doesn’t go fishing in dry riverbeds with her dead father. But years ago, she did go fishing (in fact, that’s what they lived off of probably at the time when she was homeless) with him in areas full of spiny bushes and patches of trees.
From certain angles, Hizbollah has been victorious. From other angles, it has suffered defeat. It depends on your source.
I met a woman from Uzbekistan shortly after the massacre at Andijan. Some reports said a few people were killed. Others said many people were killed. Some people claimed that the bodies of the women and children in the village were dragged out of the city by government officials and buried in the countryside before any outside news services could cover what had happened. Others said no women and children were even injured. Very few reports sounded the same.
“So, which version of the story do you believe is the truth?” I asked her.
“All of them.” She said.
What I think she meant, and what I think I’m trying to say here in a long-winded way, is that though there are explicit truths, and inherent truths, and things that just are---there are also things that are just a bit fuzzy. They gain clarity depending on the angle from which they are viewed. They make us uncomfortable because we want the cold, hard, facts. We want clear, condemning evidence for anything before we believe it. But people like D live in that uncomfortable grey space that I can hardly stand. At times I think it is a detriment to her life. At other times, I wish I were more like her.
