The Dramatic Child


She is four years old and Linda's granddaughter. There is a spider on the redwood stairs at the back door and Linda is going to kill it but cannot because, Kierra insists, "It belongs to God." So she gets it into a glass to transport it and Kierra wants to hold it. She is going to release it to freedom. "Fly!" she sings out dramatically, and the glass flies out of her hand to smash on the sidewalk.

The first Christmas I was here with Linda, which was 2002, my parents came to a party at the house. My mother was sitting on the sofa when Kierra came in. She hadn't met my mother before, but she went directly to her and climbed on her lap. She has an instinct for the receptive audience.

One picture of Kierra that sticks in my mind is when I was outside her house, talking to her dad and some other men, and she came out the door and put her hands on her hips. "Dan!" she yelled. "Get over here!"

I did.

One night I was talking to Linda on the phone and she put Kierra on. "How are you?" I asked.

"Oh, Dan," she said, "I'm so sad."

"Why are you sad?"

"Because I miss you so much."

She associates with emotion easily and learns it. She grasps the drama of the moment when the lion is returned to the jungle, the bird to the sky, the spider to the garden.

Instead of the spider coming out of the glass, as she'd imagined the dramatic moment, the glass had come out of her hand. She knew it was an even better dramatic moment, but her face was temporarily out of order, shocked at her genius. She looked bewildered at getting hysterical laughter instead of some kind of problem for smashing the glass.

The little girl was born on Linda's birthday. One day Linda was busy doing something at the table, absorbed in working, and she suddenly realized that Kierra was copying her every movement, memorizing it. She has a fear in her that something could happen to the child. All parents know that fear, which probably is why they keep such a close eye on them.

Kierra will climb rocks behind her brother, who is sure-footed as a goat, but she gets distracted. One day I saw her standing on the big granite boulder beside the house, her face turned to the late afternoon sun, her arms outstretched, singing. She was coming up with words as best she could, most any word would do in a pinch, but she was expressing her connection with the abstract. She did it with feeling.

She is already an actress.

One day her brother wanted to listen to a pop music station and she said, "Turn it off. It makes my stomach hurt." So we changed to a classical station, Mozart or something. She said. "That has ballerinas dancing in it." I remember my daughter at that age, and how there was a fully formed and profound intelligence that shone through for that time. As we get older sometimes we forget that we, too, were like that at three or four.

The older I get, the more creative freedom there seems to be, because I learn that I confused myself with other people, and forgot what I started out knowing.

There is a time before the mating rituals begin and there is a time after they are over. And in either space there is the capacity for wholeness. My mother is like that now. She has a childlike innocence, and she always asks about Kierra, whom she considers her friend. She remembers something that the little girl hasn't forgotten yet.

The very young and the very old have a secret connection. Someday an old woman will release the child back into the stream of life, and behind the untamed emotion of a new body, the original face will shine through, allowing that glimpse into a mystery.

Posted: Tue - June 22, 2004 at 03:25 PM