“Lakeside Review”
“For Pete’s sake, Jennifer! Don’t be so silly!” I exclaim, poking an impatient finger at the tearstains on my little girl’s beet-red cheeks.
How intensely green her eyes have grown in the brief interval since a distracted usher at the wedding we are attending moved the chair on which my daughter had meant to sit.
Sprawled there on the floor, bony knees and elbows exposed, with her skirt hiked up around her thighs, 9-year-old Jennifer is not to be consoled. Despite outstretched hands and whispered reassurances that hardly anyone, not even the unwitting usher now rushing to seat another guest, has noticed how she fell, she is inconsolable.
It's no big deal," I try to make her see through tears that trace a salty path down to the corners of her mouth. To my adult eyes, the child’s acute sense of shame seems so out of proportion with the cause that I could be tempted to giggle. But her thin shoulders have already begun to quiver, as she struggles for control.
“Jennifer!”
With a half-muffled sob, she ducks to hide her face, but not before I see the image of the little girl I once was reflected in those glistening, plaintiff eyes:
Once when I was six years old, I spilled ice cream at a party, and even when the birthday girl passed out shiny pennies and huge balloons, all I could see were swirls of melted chocolate on my skirt.
Then there was the time when I sat halfway through Sunday school, before someone told me that my dress was all unbuttoned down the back.
“Don't be so silly, Little One,” my voice grows soft. “You just go ahead and let those teardrops fall.”
Our sweet Jennifer when she played Amaryllis
in Clearfield High School's Music Man
