I Can Be Your Long-Lost Pal

Taking for granted that we've no need of logic, we can rightly understand how someone without a proper home can well be tossed to the melancholia of homesickness, that even one well without memories or the furniture of habit around them can be made cold by the unfamiliar even when the warmth of his customs were barely felt. Considering, naturally, that we are all at some point, or to varying degrees at all times, foreign, as it were, we may regard as worthwhile the practice of adventure.

As a matter of habit, our adventuress, as well as I, avoid the coddling of children and the raffish tendency to paint them as a bunch of angels. In one way, however, some of these little things may well be an example of something good. For children will usually prefer to play than anything else, and if given their range of all the foolish accoutrements and stuff piled round them, they will unfailingly want, first of all, to play with you, over the mechanic contraption, and also to play pretend in any variety of archetypal identities invariably where they find themselves wielding a kind of power. At once 'Doctor,' and then 'Maman,' or if the role's been claimed, 'big sister,' and on to 'Teacher,' and back round again to try on the faces of these giants in their world. There is pleasure and learning for them in playing at influence and malleable self-hood, and you'll notice just as well that it doesn't satisfy enough to declare themselves the mother of the game, but they don a new name for you, too, for the pretend must be complete and completely different, as granted by the very lack of logic.

We do sometime learn contrary to our childhood pretendings that we won't mature into firefighters and princesses; only one will be the fate and likely neither of the two. And what foolishness it is that we learn this! That we grow to deny the glorious promise of being just one intricate person. For though it is true that we can only bother ourselves concerning the way this cookie crumbles, we can be sure that this one will hold the flavor of as many as ever were, and what a joy to be given such a dough to experiment, such a vehicle for adventure!

This darling walked the gardens of Tuileries without much sense of the thousands of memories she had forgotten of herself; the long-lost intimidation she had harbored of butter and bread, the way that her legs would once always be shaking, or the months spent trying never to sleep alone; walking as she was with an even step and steady pace, her shoulders slid away from the ears and even though the temples were pounding, she did not remember the teachings she used to give, nor that most embarrassing moment of her life in Mexico 3 years prior, neither of course did she recall the previous night and how she came to be, serendipitously, here in the gardens. She smiled, thirsty. Seeing a gentleman about to sit on a lounge chair in the garden with a pack of cigarettes, she thought, "I'll call him Betty, and me, Al."