GOOD NEWS

If you are reading this, you are probably looking for something good, or at least something better than I can offer. I haven’t lived very long so I haven’t much to say; but if you are looking, I have been too. I have found things that have told me how to live in a few simple words and I have found things that have said the same thing in a thousand pages. I read them all. Then today I decided I was going to tell everyone the good news. But instead I ran into a little child on the sidewalk, sitting in the corner by the grass. She is my neighbor, but truly I do not know her or her family well. I knew enough to stop, knowing she was very sad. I kneeled down in such a way to not just seem like a hovering passerby, but to seem more caring (more than I was; for I was depressed to delay my mission and, not to mention, I have always been of the opinion that a child’s feelings are very fleeting and therefore of less credence). I asked her what was troubling her. She would not look up or answer at first. So I just hung out there for a while, thinking of nothing in particular; suddenly, so quickly and easily, I had forgotten that good news I wanted to tell everyone. When I remembered, I said aloud, ‘Oh, I can’t believe I forgot already!’ The little girl looked up at me then, and said, ‘Maybe you didn’t forget.’ ‘Sometimes people forget a lot of things,’ I said. Her eyes were as sad as anyone’s I have ever seen. I was quiet and forgot my troubles again. ‘I think people forget I am just a child,’ she said. ‘Yes?’ I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. (And here I thought I knew the secret to everything a moment ago!) She said, ‘Or if they remember, they don’t remember that the same things that hurt them hurt me too.’ ‘Did someone hurt you?’ I asked. Then she half-smiled and said, ‘I get hurt pretty easily because I always give away my heart.’ I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant to be honest, though thinking now, I suppose children do give away their hearts like no one else I have ever known, for they have nothing else to give. When I said nothing she just continued to talk and her smile continued to grow. ‘I give it in pink and red and even in blue; I give it in white and in polka-dots, too. I give it cut out of paper and on cards; and I give it a lot on valentines.’ Then she was standing up and she was taller than me. ‘My heart is my favorite thing to give,’ she said; ’so here’s one, for you.’ And she handed me a rock shaped much like a heart, and with a smile she headed on back home. So now I have this rock shaped much like a heart and I haven’t much to do with it, really. I have been carrying it in my pocket all day, and the thing has been getting rather heavy. Oh, no, not the rock; the one in my own bosom. For what use is a heart if you don’t share it? –So that it becomes too heavy for an angel to bear away. And perhaps that is what I did today (share my heart, I mean) when I talked to a sad little girl, or perhaps that is what she did when she gave me a rock. I know one thing, I will take a rock over a thousand pages in a thousand books any day. And that is the secret to everything, so far as I know today.