so yesterday, i forgot my damned key card to my apt. complex and was waiting outside in the cold, complaining to myself about my own absent-mindedness in the face of all other possible deficiencies …

and then suddenly …

two chidren, a girl and a boy no more than 6 or 7 years old, and their father walked passed me holding hands, the little girl watching her father’s foot steps and trying to match them with her own small leaps and bounds.

“Daddy,” she said, in that sweet girl voice only a small child has.

“Yes, honey.”

“Daddy, we have to protect the animals and the trees and the plants and everything, don’t we? We can’t kill them, right?” she said, so innocently questioning.

“Yes, baby.”

“Because if we do that everything else dies, doesn’t it Daddy? Doesn’t it?”

She kept skipping along behind me, disappearing around the corner, as this slow sad smile crept up on me, with one of those strange bursts of emotion that only shows through when you have no choice but to take it all in … breathing in this tired adult air, wishing the children would really lead as much as they should and could … and that we would listen as much to them as we do to our own repititive bantering …