From the somebody pinch me files

Yesterday at bedtime, T. launched into a long story about something and I was only half-listening, I admit. My brain was sorting out some other things, and lying there in the semi-dark of her room was the perfect chance for all those other things to come tumbling down into the forefront of my tired brain. But my ears pricked up when I heard her say something about a door, and finding herself somewhere else.

"What? What door?"

"The door in my Spanish class," she said. "It opened somewhere else."

A surreal picture flashed in my mind. It was like a Magritte painting--a single door opening up in an ordinary classroom wall to some other place; maybe a rectangle of blue sky beyond, or a green meadow, or--who knew?--Narnia perhaps? But before I could let my imagination run away too far with this image, T. went on to describe how the door had opened up to a hallway under the school building, instead of at the front, the way they had gone in. I still don't quite understand the logistics of it, but she worked it out for herself with no help from me, and we moved on to another topic.

Something about her story jarred my memory and took me back all the way to when L. was three years old, and had just started preschool at an established church-affiliated preschool not too far from our house. There is much about that day I remember: the sight of him kneeling on the carpet next to the teacher, stacking colored blocks; the wobbly feeling in my legs as I walked away and left him there, for the first time ever; how I sat in the van under the shadow of the tall chapel steeple and cried, and felt my separation from him as keenly as I would have if he'd been ripped from inside of me. When I picked him up that afternoon I was so eager to hear about his morning, but he didn't want to talk at all.

Then, just as we had almost reached our house, he said:

"I didn't really like going to that man's house today."

My insides froze, from my head down to my heart, down to my legs, like someone had poured ice water over me. What man's house? Terrible thoughts filled my head. What had happened at preschool? Why had he been taken to some man's house? Was I told about this beforehand and forgotten? I probed further, trying to keep the alarm from my voice. Where was this man's house? How did you get there? What did he look like? What was his name?

"We walked," he said. "It wasn't far."

"What was it like?"

"Big," he answered. "I didn't like it because it was so big, and we had to stand still and couldn't talk."

My poor child! He was kept quiet at this strange man's house! I was just about to stop and turn the car around--to drive back to the preschool and hammer on the front door, and demand an explanation, when L.'s voice piped up again:

"The man's name was God. It was God's house, Mama."

I had to pull over then, and laugh with hysterial relief--mostly at myself. 

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