Kids Allowed

What happens when children are openly welcomed in places we don't expect them to be?

Whenever supernatural specters show up in film or television, a question inevitably arises from my five year old’s running consciousness: But, are ghosts really real, Dada? 

The answer is, well, sort of, I tell her. Amorphous apparitions are not floating around the garden while you await the Great Pumpkin on All Hallow’s Eve. And they’re not hiding in the closet hemmed into your hoodie holes. Nor are they creaking on the floors in the attic, as the February wind blows.

But also, yes, yes they are there, sometimes in plain sight.

It all started when I decided to take Constitutional Law during sophomore year. The professor, whose name is long gone in memory, had an uncanny resemblance to my father, who at the time had been dead for almost a decade. The man’s mannerisms, too – the way his glasses hung off of his sunbleached feather cut – cast a pleasant echo that only in later years I had come to respect in the dopplegängers of the dead that show up from time to time.

Constitutional Law wasn’t supposed to be a container for memories. It was supposed to be a general education box to check off on the way to completing a slightly above average college career at my state institution of higher learning. Then, as the first class commenced, my teacher/dad explained that it is a student’s right to skip class (I’m listening), and if said slackers show up for the midterm and final, they’ll get the grades they earned on those tests, nothing less. Imagining sunny spring afternoons spent skipping school, I leaned in. Being born a preternatural bubble filler does have its benefits, after all.

Then, in the second class (what was I even doing there?!!), he showed up. A small boy, with sandy hair had settled in, apparently there to get the extra credit points promised for actually attending the scheduled meetings on his way to three Bachelor of Arts credits. A few minutes in, the child started, well, opining. In the middle of a soliloquy on the Cult of the Cloak by the man paid to be there, the boy interrupted with his own declaration regarding the sanctity of American institutions: AHHHHH-AHHHHH-AHHHHH! 

Well spoken, young man, but are you registered for this class? Is this your homework, Larry?

We students sat motionless, each waiting for someone else to explain the oddity. Then the little devil dusted off his Keds and began running up and down the makeshift aisles of the hallowed (not really) lecture hall. He was simply doing the thing that three year olds do, which is hark incoherently in a pitchless song of mostly vowels.

Ewwwwwwwwwoooooo! Uaaauaaaaaaaaaaaap! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! He dopplered his way down one row. Owwwwww! Awwwwwwww! Uhhhhhhnnn! up another. Through it, the instructor just kept on, well, instructing. 

Finally, after what felt like forty minutes later (but was probably two), the man in charge of this place interrupted himself to say something like the following:

“Just a quick note: children are welcome in this class.”

And so it was settled. On to the next part of the syllabus, I guess. Meanwhile, the kid kept on running and singing his way through Constitutional Law. No explanation was ever given for his presence, nor was it needed. The boy was welcome. And that was that. No further questions, your honor.

A few days later, thirty minutes before my scheduled delinquency – I had already started planning my afternoon of Not Going to Class – something weird happened. Instead of plopping my guitar into my lap to learn yet another Dave Matthews Band song, I slipped my sneaks on. Then, I sauntered in the direction of the plain brick publicly-funded building that my professor/dad had made quite clear the previous Thursday that I did not have to walk into that day.

And when I got there, there was the kid, whipping around the aisles, stopping occasionally to sit at a desk and color. He was one of us, now. A scholar of ⅓ of the branches of U.S. government. In the front of the room, the tenured faculty kept right on droning along to the beat of his own lesson plan. I found my pen somewhere in the recesses of my backpack, and started taking notes.