Soon after my elderly neighbour died,
and long after her son had died in an accident of some sort,
the details of which I never knew,
I found her old memory box.
I opened it and selected a document at random.
It was something from her son’s grade one class.
It was a summary of documents
submitted by the students themselves,
their names,
their favourite colours,
the names of their best friends,
and what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Many boys wanted to be firemen.
Many girls wanted to be teachers.
I frowned at those traditional roles.
One girl wanted to be a princess.
And one brave lad wanted to be a mommy,
which caused me to smile and cheer for him.
At the bottom of the page, my neighbour had written:
It’s so sad to see that not a single ‘best friend’ was reciprocated by the other.
Poor children.