It was a bright sunny day in February so I drove to my favorite spot on the beach. There were only a few vehicles in the small lot. I parked between two SUVs near the entrance to the wooden walkway built above the dunes. The wide sandy beach was almost empty. I sat on a bench in front of the dunes and read my book.
After a half-hour the wind came up suddenly, as if a switch had been turned. The sun was warm. The water was cold and the wind blowing in from the sea made it too chilly for me, so I went to a small square deck built on the side of the walkway and sat in the back corner of the bench protected from the wind.
I put my book aside and leaned my head back soaking in the clear winter sunlight. Soon I heard the sounds of walking from the beach A small girl, maybe 4 years old, was running and skipping across the planks of the walkway, as small girls do.
She saw me over in the corner and stopped. We looked at one another. She was wide open in heart, mind and body. Simply delighted to be alive, experiencing herself and whatever she encountered. At that moment, I was in exactly the same state.
She skipped/ran a short distance toward the parking lot, and then turned around as a man and a woman came into view, presumably her parents. They were both tall and broad. Large humans. The woman might have been pregnant. They didn’t linger but kept right on towards the parking lot. My impression was that they were preoccupied in some way.
As the little girl approached them she said, with joy, “That boy looked at me!” I heard in her words a sense of accomplishment.
The grown-ups didn’t say anything, didn’t change stride, and they all continued on their way.
It seemed to me that what the little girl was really saying was, “that boy saw me!”, and maybe she wasn’t being fully seen so much lately.
Now maybe for her, at her age, anyone not a girl or a woman, is ‘a boy’. I don’t know. Anyone else would likely describe me as ‘a man’ or ‘an older man’.
But what she saw in me was that same innocent openness in her. She saw a boy. And that boy saw her, too.