Saturday, September 22, 2007

last days of summer...

one sunny afternoon my mom came home with new summer sandals for me. it was my turn. my mom is a single mother with four children and she couldn’t buy all of us shoes at the same time. so she would buy us all shoes one by one as we needed them, and this was my turn. new pretty sandals for the summer. i was so happy and beside myself, i couldn’t wait to show my friends, not in a spirit of pride, more so in the spirit of sharing my enjoyment and fun. we were little things, maybe four years old or so, and these were the days when children could go out and play in front of the house or nearby without any problems for the most part.

there i was with the girls showing them my sandals. some of the girls i knew and some of them i didn’t know. and now that i think of it, of course, you know how children just take up playing with one another, it doesn’t matter that they haven’t met before. in a way there is something beautiful in that, how it doesn’t matter, they see one another as the same.

this day when the girls were admiring my sandals and trying them on, (we girls have always liked sharing and borrowing and lending our pretty things) one of the girls whom i did not know asked if she could wear my new sandals home and show her mom how pretty they were. of course i said, she left me her shoes and i waited for her to come back. she never did. i was heart broken. and since i didn’t know the girl i did not know where she lived.

i went home with someone else’s shoes, my mother couldn’t believe her eyes. i was crying and wearing these strange and ill fitting shoes. once my mom was able to determine that i was safe and unharmed, she could not believe the story of my stolen summer sandals. she took me by the hand and we set out to find the little girl who had taken my shoes. my mom talked about the work and the amount of time it took her to save to buy me new sandals, this paled in comparison to my little heart break experience of the day, though i tried my best to sympathize as a little one.

we never did find that little girl thief (smile), and i had to wear my old sandals for the rest of the summer. but as children tend to do, i forgot all about it in little or no time and concentrated on summer fun.

1 comment:

Jorge said...

i see you started adding labels. the idea is that in the future there will be several posts sharing the same tag(s), for instance "summertime" or "sundays". of course you can add as many tags as you want to each single post. and then it's useful arranging the display of the blog so that you can see the complete list of tags on the blog's home page, as a thematic index.

otra cosa: dices que olvidaste pronto ese episodio de las sandalias pero, por lo que escribes, parece que no lo has olvidado, que ha seguido siendo importante para ti, y que por eso escribes sobre él ahora, ¿no?