“Close your eyes momma,” the little girl said. She held a small chunk of concrete out in front of her. Her mother had just taken a seat on a stone bench in the neighborhood triangle. This space was too small to be ever called a park, a green space in theory, but the neighborhood garden folk had planted such good trees that there was no grass to be found. More often the triangle was a salad of dried leaves and rocks, chunks of concrete fallen from trucks, various stones from the drives of this stately home or that one, carried down the road by a heavy rain. But they are nice spaces. Roughly the size of a two car garage are these several triangles scattered about our meandering neighborhood. But they are a break from the pavement. A little more shade. A place to let a child or dog wander for a moment and stand on a rock and jump down. To climb up and jump down. To climb up and jump down. Again.

The woman turned to her husband who had taken a seat beside her. They were young, handsome, content looking, but one never knows. They looked like characters from a novel. Oddly lovely. With a blonde headed doll of a daughter with curls and bumptious glee. The child was now ordering to her father, “Cover your eyes, Daddy.” He closed his eyes. Insufficient. Clearly. Even to me. A lurking voyeur. He was practically cheating. She needed him to buy in completely and that meant picking up his hands and covering his eyes, peek-a-boo style. 

“You really have to cover your eyes,” the wife said to him, with a bemused look that suggested that the beautiful man had been conjured forth from her imagination, but that she had forgotten to explain the extremely serious rules of the make believe world. “With your hands.” Momma understood. The girl well shivered with excitement, chunk of concrete still right there in her hand, clear as day and visible to all, when her father complied. 

Lovers, they, sitting on the park bench with their hands covering their eyes. Comfort with being three, but with an air of being not quite sure it was really happening. Lacking the callouses and bruises of time that make you understand so deeply what everyone tells you relentlessly, regardless, that this is so fleeting. That you will forget. That you need to stop everything when a child tells you to cover your eyes. Because you only get to do it a finite number of times. You only get to be a part of that an exact and countable number of instances. One day when you remove your hands you will be watching the child drive off, away from your home, to a university three states away. 

That is a kind of magic, too. The anesthesia of time. The days of diapers and pacifiers and naps and tantrums tied together like twisted sausages in a cartoon. One after the other, with no end in sight. Until it ends. One day. You will watch videos that you were smart or bored enough to take years prior with your phone, and not remember being there, or being that person at all. 

Back to her. That perfect moment. First that. She had them both there. In her thrall. No more than three and she had brought them both to her full attention, to see her surprise. What a lovely thing for a child that age, to command the attention of the grown ups and to pull them into your own world. Even at that age, one knows the elders mostly traffic in reality, and food, and messes, and carseats.

Then, the big moment. The reveal. “Surprise!” She yelled it and hopped a few times, holding the chunk of concrete out for appraisal. It had never moved. She had forgotten to hide it behind her back in all the bedlam of waiting for her father to figure things out.  She had so much to do. 

How magic! How lovely. How cleverly acquired. A true treasure. An heirloom. A keepsake. A diamond. No, a magic stone containing a magic spell. In one second I saw all of the possibilities of the greatness of her concrete chunk. I was merely passing by. 

They removed their hands from their eyes and reacted to the chunk that was there just seconds before and was still there. There were a few celebratory words. What a nice rock. Had they not seen it at all, or had she given them so many magical rocks lately that this was a gold coin tossed into an ocean of gold bars? I found that I had stopped. In my tracks. And watched this small family and this moment. As the tears welled up in my eyes and my throat closed with emotion and the realization that I was making myself a part of a moment to which I did not belong, I said, embarrassed, “My eighteen year old daughter is going to college in Florida.” 

I turned and kept walking away. Overcome. I worried for a brief moment that I was experiencing a medical event or that I was being pulled into a different plane of existence. They had their eyes covered. They had done what she had asked. They didn’t see what I saw. That moment where a little girls eyes transubstantiated a chunk of concrete into a diamond. No less of a mystery than a priest turning bread into body. Is magic something wished for so hard that it can be seen by the naked eye? Even for the briefest second. Yes. I think so. 

You have to buy in completely. You do have to cover your eyes. But you have to cover your eyes to see, not to not see. Cover your eyes and believe with her. Cover your eyes and feel the energy flowing from her perspective of infinite possibility. She believes completely. And you can too for a moment. It won’t pay the bills, but it might keep you sane…to be not completely ossified yet…to close your eyes and cover your eyes and squeeze them closed too. To see. The saddest bit is that most of us, myself included, don’t figure this out until we are watching someone else’s child do it, years distant from the exhaustion and tantrums and messes. And then is is exquisitely sad and beautiful all at the same time.