A Few Gold Sequins on the Front Steps

The Boston Herald

A few gold sequins on the front steps. That’s all that remains of her. Everything  else was here before she came: A book of children’s rhymes. A box of crayons. A deck of cards.  

She spilled the sequins her last time out the door. Her arms were full and she knocked a plastic box of the tiny gold things to the ground,  bent down, scooped them up, recovered most, but not all.  A few dozen remain, shimmering in the sunlight, drawing the eye. I haven’t swept them up and I don’t plan to . Every time I open the door, I see them and smile. 

It’s seems fitting that sparkling things are what Xena left behind.  For I  know that the world shimmered and sparkled when she was here. There’s a children’s song that Shirley Temple sings in one of her old movies. “An ordinary day becomes a holiday, when I’m with you.”   That song reminds me of Xena. 

A 12-year-old and a 51-year-old. What could we possibly have in common? What would we do together for seven whole weeks?  That’s what her friends asked her and that’s what my friends asked me. 

“I don’t like being 12,”  she confessed on the telephone a few days before she  arrived.  “I’m too old to do the things the little kids do and when I do everyone says, ‘You need to act your age, Xena.’ And when I try to act my age, they say, ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, Xena.’”

“I  sort of know how you feel,” I told her. “I think I feel the same way. Too old to be young, but too young to be old.” 

“Exactly,” she replied. 

Mutt and Jeff . Felix and Oscar.  Jack Sprat and his wife. I guess we made as odd a pair but it never felt odd, or strained or uncomfortable. Not for a second. Xena was my  excuse for eating chocolate chip pancakes every morning and driving to the Dairy Barn every afternoon and keeping the candy jar full and bringing the library books back on time and playing cards and painting my toenails in a rainbow of colors and going for long walks and singing silly songs and just sitting and listening to her or watching her swim or reading to her. 

And maybe I was Xena’s excuse, too, for being read to, for liking the Boston Pops, for enjoying books on tape – and we played them every time we were in the car -  for listening to show music, for sitting through half a dozen old movies and just as many plays, for going to church and to restaurants, for doing so many adult things. 

“Are you bored yet?” I would call out from my office every day. 

“No, I’m not bored,” she’d say. “I have a dollhouse to decorate” or “I have a jewelry box to make” or  “I have my reading and lots of cartoons I can watch.”

Sometimes she’d come into my office and sit on the floor and watch as I wrote. 

“You must be bored now,” I’d say.

“No. I just like being with you, Beverly.”

Imagine that. She just liked being with me. 

And I loved being with her. It’s that simple.  She made even trips to Shaws enjoyable and that’s pretty hard to do. All the ordinary, every day things -  setting the table, emptying the dishwasher, folding the laundry, going to the post office and to the bank, waiting at the doctor’s, walking to the corner store – these were things we did together, so they were no longer dreaded chores. 

In the car driving Xena home, I turned to her and asked, “So what was your ,favorite thing you did at my house? What are you going to remember most about this summer.”

“You mean besides being with you?” 

I nodded and she paused and thought for a moment. “I liked the Boston Pops the best. The Fourth of July one.”  

Her mother calls Xena an old soul. Her teacher wrote in his end of the year report that “Xena has a moral intelligence and understanding heart which the world so badly needs.”

Perhaps she is an old soul, the gold on the front steps not sequins at all, just a few pieces of her heart that she left behind.