Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a moist gray November in my soul; whenever I find myself slathered by lies and poseurs, afflicted by devious performance art at every turn, and grimly expecting the worst of every situation and every person I meet; whenever I find myself expecting to be cut off in traffic, to be shortchanged at the store, to hear an ominous clank in the transmission, to catch a cold, to be ludicrously overbilled by the insurance company, to find the library closed early, to endure computer malfunction, to find the wine sour, to lose my keys, to hear of sudden surgery in the tribe, to discover a city of slugs in the cellar, and to find a dead owlet under the cracked front picture window, then I account it high time to get to a kindergarten as fast as I can, and sit myself down in a tiny chair, looking not unlike a large hairy bespectacled bookish giant, and inquire of the lives and dreams and feats of the small populace, and listen with the most assiduous and ferocious attention, for I find that as few as twenty minutes with people no taller than your belt buckle is enormously refreshing, and gloriously educational, and wonderfully startling, and endlessly hilarious and very much like drinking a tremendous glass of crystalline water when you have been desperately thirsty for a long time, and in something of a personal desert.
They will tell you of the animals with whom they speak cheerfully and at length every day, and explain carefully what the animals say in return, speaking sometimes with noses and their feet and their fingers. They will tell you of their dream in which they are swifter than falcons and bigger than bears, They will tell you of their futures when they are absolutely going to be dancers and pilots and firefighters. They will tell you of the strange wild mysterious people in their lives, some of the visible and some not, as yet. They will talk knowledgeably of angels and spirits and voices that come out of the ground if you dig a deep enough hole. they will speak other languages than ones you know or they know. They will sing with or without the slightest provocation or solicitation. They love to explain things by drawing them, and colors for them have flavors and characters and tonal intimations and strict rules and regulations, depending on the artist, you can use green for buffalo, but you cannot use blue for cougars, because cougars are afraid of blue, every knows that.
If you draw them out and give them time and afford them the clear sense that you are not judging or assessing or measuring them in any way, they will stretch out and tell tales of adventure and derring-do that would make filmmakers and novelists drool. They hold hands and kiss each other without the slightest self-consciousness or social awareness. They suddenly break off conversations to do headstands because when a headstand needs to be done it should be done without delay. They are inordinately proud of their socks and show you their socks at every opportunity and you never saw such a wild welter of bright animated colorfully patterned socks in your life as those in kindergartens: It is Sock Paradise. They use the word cubby all the time, which is a pleasant rotund word that we should use more often. When they are released into the schoolyard or the playground they sprint out into the welcoming embrace of the wild green world with all their might with their arms
flung open and their mouths open and their shoes untied, and when I see this from my tiny chair, when I see them fling themselves howling and thrilling into the delicious world that arose miraculously from the emptiness of the vast unknowable universe, I weep at the joy, and at some other thing I do not understand--their irrepressible innocence, my battered innocence, our assaulted endangered innocence, their clean fresh unconscious grace, the fraught teetering of our species, and then I arise, and thank the teacher for allowing me to visit, and drive home restored.
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