She'd taught everything they needed to know. She'd taught them compassion and trust.
Life lessons from a seven year old.

author of literary fiction with a southern drawl
She'd taught everything they needed to know. She'd taught them compassion and trust.
This man built treehouses and death-defying water slides. Once he took me, my sister and little brother out in the woods and told us to find all the moss we could. He wouldn't tell us why, just gave us buckets to fill. Later he took the double-decker wire mesh tool rack off of his work [...]
I met a man who I'll never forget. He stopped me in the hallway to tell me how scared he was. He hated coming in, hated the word cardiology, hated the word echo. Hated my scrubs. He was over six feet of raw emotions carrying his new baby. I explained the test in the hallway [...]
He was stressed because of some new things going on that I wasn't aware of. For some reason I told him about Curly having seizures. I have no idea why that popped up but, it did.
Thanks to sixteen years in pediatrics and all of the great kids I met- I have hope that they are more aware, more considerate, and way smarter than we give them credit for.
The next night the gift came in the form of a fireball shooting nun celebrating her retirement from St. Bernard's at Lipstick Lounge.
Before long, his soft, mossy shell was hard again. It almost sparkled under his sunlamp-my little nieces, my brother's three girls, thought it looked like gold and asked if he was magic. I thought so.
I met a boy. Another underage kid with some detailed, well done tattoos. He was sixteen, but big for his age. With his height and his tattoos he could easily pass for eighteen - or twenty, but when he smiled at me he looked like a little boy. A kid. He was nervous so I [...]
He was broke and broken down, he said. "I didn't even have money to stay at a cheap motel, I was going to sleep in my truck. I was banking on winning enough money to get back home on."
When I was little, I had an imaginary friend, his name was Uncle Wilkensack. Actually, I had twenty one imaginary friends because Uncle Wilkensack had a wife, they had seventeen kids and they had two pet alligators. I can still remember the first time I met them. I was sick with a high fever, lying [...]