If Miss Hooker would marry me I’d be the happiest ten-year-old boy alive or dead, for that matter. (Heaven must be a happy place). She teaches our Sunday School class and she’s the most beautiful girl in the world and what’s more she’s a woman. It’s true I’m only 10 and she’s 30 or even older but I don’t think age matters when it’s true love, and it must be, I can feel it. If there’s a problem it’s that she doesn’t feel it, too, at least not yet. And I admit I’m a little young and can’t get married until I’m 18 or is it 16—I’ll have to check. But I’ll be ready, whatever the answer is. Of course, she’ll be eight years older, too, or six, which means she’ll be Mother’s age now, but she still looks pretty good, does Mother, but I guess Father’s a better judge of that and anyway, she’s his girl, not mine. So I pray before I go to sleep at night that God will make Miss Hooker fall in love with me, when I get old enough, I mean, to marry. I pray it in Jesus’ name. He was the Son of God—or is? I am Too—the son of Father, I mean, not of God, but if you go back far enough to Adam, then maybe that’s pretty close, though not as close as for Jesus. But now I’m getting confused. She has red hair and blue eyes and freckles on her arms and legs in a dress that’s shorter than Mother’s and that’s how I’m sure she’s younger, Miss Hooker, I mean, and shoes that have holes in the snouts and she paints her toenails—Mother doesn’t. Last week they were pink and the week before blue. Like her eyes. When she tells the story of Samson and Delilah you’d swear that she was there. After class last Sunday I put my hands on either side of the door and pushed and pushed and pushed away from me to make the walls fall down but all I did was rip the seat of my pants. I was glad that all the other kids had gone. Uh oh, Miss Hooker said. You don’t know your limits. Yes ma’am, I said. I was disappointed when I asked Notice anything different? and she said No. But then she said, I think there’s a crack in the ceiling I wasn’t aware of before. The truth is she was wrong and that’s love but I’m not sure what kind. Maybe she just felt sorry for me but that’s a start. And then we’ll have a baby —I’ll know by then or else she’ll show me how or I’ll show her when I learn the secret or we’ll huddle up and do it that way. I like Samson for a name but we’ll see.
This article appears in September 2017 Issue.
