My baby cousin, Kaitlyn, paid me a visit. She discovered a set of stacked coasters and began taking them apart, then piling everything up again. She had everything upside down at first, and I was leaning down to help her when my mother said, "Let her do it herself."
"But I don't want her to know that the world is hard," I said, then did the thing that was hard, and struggled to let her struggle.
August 27, 2003