The Flight to San Francisco

On the plane to San Francisco to lead a two-day writers' workshop (after a few beautiful days in Houston, seeing my parents and brother).
 
There's a girl sitting behind me on the plane – maybe three or four years old – sitting between her parents. She's keeping up a long, animated conversation with herself and/or them; she's singing, making observations, asking to be read to, asking what things are outside the window, looking for her coloring book, creating a village with little dolls, telling her parents she loves them.
 
Her parents aren't shushing her at all, which I love, even though it's not a quiet conversation and we're in a crowded plane.
 
And I remember that my mother was occasionally called up to my elementary school because I would sing in class (to myself), and it was "disruptive," (“students should be quiet,") and I apparently asked all those questions too, endlessly, and it occurred to me that at some point so many people lose that... the singing, observing, asking, playing, seeing, coloring. But we started out as that.
 
And then there are the people who grow up and stay that way. The actors, singers, dancers, writers, painters, poets... artists who missed or ignored the prompt about being quiet. That's why we have tribes. To be with other people who still play.
 
Those are the people I want to spend my time with.

Part Two (later that day)
 
My friends. There's a part two of my airplane story from earlier today. The one of the child behind me who was so animated and joyful that it prompted me to write about a post about it. I didn't look at the family, I just listened, and I assumed the kid was a girl, but it turns out that he was a boy. I was sorry to misgender him in that post, but here's why I'm writing again.
 
The boy sitting between his parents, who turned out to be four years old, was a cancer patient. He was on his way back from two months at St. Jude's, and thirty (thirty, the mom said) rounds of chemotherapy for an advanced cancer. This was said to me because I turned around toward the end of the flight to tell them how much I Ioved sitting in front of them and how great their kid was.
 
I told the mom I had posted about them on Facebook, which made her laugh. I told her how wonderful their parenting was, that they never once told him to shush. The boy was coming home after two months and was about to undergo radiation. He had lost all his hair and was so gaunt, with deep circles under his eyes, but he was the kid sitting behind me that I wrote about because he was so alive. Singing, coloring, making a doll village, looking out the window, asking questions, telling his parents he loves them.
 
This changes the story, because to me this is the story. The resilience of children. The joy after suffering all that. It's startling.
 
I will never forget this kid.
 
There are very few things I've experienced in my lifetime, certainly in an airplane, that went as deep into my heart as this.