Today Jack died. Jack is Laura Ingall’s dog. We read one chapter from the Little House on the Prairie series EVERY bedtime. It’s impossible not to. Ella counts on it to let go of the day. The problem with tonight’s chapter was that I knew Jack was about to die, it was 11:30 pm, and Ella was REALLY tired. I knew she would fall apart. I knew this because Ella has been emotionally intelligent since birth. For example, since the first time she heard it, she cannot stand to hear us sing or hum “On Top of Spaghetti”. The original tune, “On Top of Old Smokey” is a lamenting American folk song about betrayal, lost love, and death probably originating from the Scottish and Irish settlers in the Ozarks or central Appalachian region. Ella is highly sensitive – to sound, to the emotional states of others, to animals, to smell, to details, to taste, to life in general.
Before bedtime, Ella sat near Nono and listened to him sing traditional Sicilian folk songs. She ended the evening with a big hug for Nono and a hearfelt, “Ti voglio bene.” He teared up and answered with “Come facciamo senza di te?” (What will we do without you?)
So, Jack dying during our nightly reading was the straw that unlocked the floodgates. She made the connection between the old Jack dog and the aging Nono. “I’m sad because Nono, will get old and disappear and die and won’t be with us anymore.” My weak attempt at comforting her was to say that there is a time to live and a time to die. However, our answers are more complicated without religion in our lives. If we could accept the Catholic answer, we could simply say that we’ll all die and go to heaven and heaven is better than life on earth and let’s just count the days till we get there - “Better days are coming,” As my 95 year old grandmother likes to say.
Anyway, to appreciate Ella’s sensitive outlook, to actually nurture it and help her leverage it as a competitive edge in a world of superficiality and insensitivity will be quite the challenge. The fact that she notices that my bathing suit strap is slightly twisted, but can’t tell the difference between a ‘b’ and ‘d’ is confusing. Today we played a memory game of letter cards with grid of 12 cards, 4 x 3. She did quite well. She remembers where the shapes are, she now recognizes almost all the letters, she can get almost up to 20 without a hitch, she can read almost all the 3 letter ‘a’ words I can throw at her. She is making progress – is it fast enough for a society that throws up oil into the eyes of dolphins, bombards children with images of anorexic Barbie dolls and gun-toting rap stars, and sends young men and women to fight until they end up dead, broken or crazy for sake of right wing propaganda? Don’t know. But we’ll do our best to keep our HSP AOK.
Distractions/Tangents:
- Wikipedia entry for Highly_sensitive_person
- On Top of Spaghetti
- On Top of Old Smokey
- The Highly Sensitive Child
CONNECTED:
MY mother, had she seen last week, would have turned 90 on July 28. She was famous in her childrens lives for two sayings. My sisters and I repeat them in jest, knowing they are ultimatly true, to each other when we feel the need for non sequiturs. The second phrase, which mom adopted after my father’s death was, “You can live too long,______________”. The blank is where she’d insert one of our names, as if announcing a sentence before a court. The first phrase, apropos in this case because my mother, born Scotish and Presbyterian, was fundamentally an islander. She never surrendered the emotion that comes from knowing you’re surrounded.
“T’was ever thus!”, Ann would say, as if a Shakespearian. As children we learned the questions, (and the answers,) would always be the same.
Thank you for sharing your life, Ann. You too, Nita.
buono fortuna
gs