Tiny Distant Flags

Un jour, notre jeunesse sera derrière nous

Someday Our Youth Will Be Behind Us

There is a voice grown-ups reserve for little boys and girls—they pull their words out of hats and infuse them with joy and wonder, transforming them into seesaws and swing sets, cotton candy and carousels, toy trucks and train tracks, bunny ears and doves. Sometimes one has to wonder if they remember this voice from their own childhood, from afternoons at the park waiting for rainbows and magic, from houses with airy kitchens and sunny porches, from their grandfather’s lap, his hands leathery and smelling of smoke. One has to wonder just how much they remember.

On rare occasions it is the same voice they use on bigger boys and girls like us, but those moments are so few and far between that we tend to forget, and anyway those voices are lost to the sounds of slamming doors, engines rumbling to life, fingers flying over a keyboard.

And yet, a promise: we will hear this voice again from our own selves, in the future. We will reserve it for people we love— sad grown men and women who might need to feel like children again—and we will take good care of one another, because that is mostly what we have learned through the years. We will listen for the chance to recognize in one another our smaller, simpler selves.

Someday our youth will be tiny, distant flags behind us and we will tell our sons and daughters that when the world is too big, and everyone just wants to be larger than life, it helps to feel little again.