Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

When I went to pick up Julia today at school, her principal -- the most approachable man on the earth -- told me that Julia came to him this morning to tell him that two girls were fighting on the bus on the way to school. She told him that the fighting upset her. I had to ask him if he meant my Julia came to talk to him. And sure enough, it was my Julia! He said that another child came in afterwards and told him the same story.

We were both amazed that the awareness Julia showed and the appropriateness of her action. When I asked her about it tonight at bedtime, she told me that she told her teacher and her teacher advised her to tell the principal.

And she followed that direction!

She told me that she felt very badly that two girls were fighting. She game me their names and told me that they were hitting each other after yelling. This is something that she could not have cogently repeated last year.

As for me today. I packed up, delivered, cleaned another manuscript box and refiled. I read somewhere that in order for new things to happen, you must make room for them. Maybe I am doing that -- making room for the rest of life.

As I was going through papers, I found some of my mother's mother's information, and a slip of paper, in my mother's handwriting of her father's date of birth and death. So far, I have nothing else of her father. And there I saw that her father died at 53 -- It could have been 40 or 60. In our family, his death left his wife a widow with two small daughters (the oldest Julia's age) and a son (from a first marriage) still in Ukraine. And the story from that time was how my grandmother scrubbed floors to make enough for them to survive. 53. I wonder how old my grandmother was. 53. I wonder how she grieved. I don't remember her in anything other than black or very dark blue. And that was 20 years later. Most of my family is long-lived. This grandfather who I grew up without knowing was never talked about when I was a kid. It had been too long before to remember much, I guess. 53. And I am feeling a kinship now with a woman I never had an adult conversation with.