Lifted

There’s a small boy in my school, a sixth grader, who rides around in a tiny little wheelchair and has a one-on-one aide to help him. Every day I see him leaving school; he wheels cheerfully outside with his aide and his mother picks him up in her van. He can walk; I’m not sure exactly why he’s in the wheelchair; it has something to do with his bones breaking easily.

Yesterday, I left right at dismissal time and I passed the mother’s van just in time to see her lifting her small boy in through the side door. In a split-second interval I watched a choreography that the two of them have rehearsed every day -- how many times, how many days, of this? -- The boy, standing straight and stiff in front of his mother, so that she could wrap her arms around him and, a small person herself, gently hoist him up into the van. There was so much poetry in his simple, patient, expectant pose; in her sure and steady balance. The routine fluidity of the movement told a story; In that fraction of a moment I secretly witnessed the simple dance of love between a mother and her beautiful, bright-eyed, breakable boy.