Letter No. 5: The Classroom

Parades have a rhythm to them.

Sirens pass. Children wave. Horses clop down the middle of streets that usually belong to cars. Candy flies through the air with surprising generosity. For a little while, complete strangers seem remarkably interested in making children smile.

I was watching one of those parades recently when something unexpected caught my attention.

During a lull between floats, a single Tootsie Roll came rolling down the street. Not tumbling. Rolling. Guided by the wind.

It looked perfectly ordinary.

Except…I knew it wasn’t.

A real Tootsie Roll doesn’t move like that; the candy inside is too heavy.

Sure enough, someone had carefully removed the candy, twisted the ends back into place, and left the wrapper in the street for someone else to discover.

I smiled, not because I thought it was funny, but because I knew what was about to happen.

A little girl spotted it. She hurried toward it with the kind of excitement only children have when they believe they’ve discovered something everyone else has missed. She bent down, picked it up, looked at it, and then, almost instantly, tossed it aside.

The parade kept moving. A tractor rumbled past. The rodeo queen smiled and waved from horseback. Another float scattered candy into the crowd.

Almost no one noticed what had just happened. The woman sitting beside me did. We looked at each other and laughed. Then I found myself thinking about why we were laughing.

The little girl had reached for what looked like a small gift and found only air wrapped in paper. I don’t know whether she remembered the moment five minutes later. But I found myself thinking about the disappointments that had formed me. Some taught me to look more carefully. Others tempted me to distrust whatever came next.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter tensions of wisdom: learning to recognize what is empty without becoming suspicious of every gift.

For a few brief seconds, an ordinary parade became a classroom. The lesson was not simply to be more careful. It was to let disappointment make me wiser without allowing it to make me cynical.

And I’m still learning the lesson.

Until next Sunday,

George

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