A Story-telling

So three-year-old niece digs up a box full of kiddy books from the big tub full of playthings. Says something akin to "Let's go read these". You are so happy, there's nothing you love more than reading to someone, of any age. You are in your element here. So she waddles to the sofa where we settle down for the reading. When you reach out for the books, she grabs them from you. And opens a book from the last page, and starts telling you the story.

Yes, apparently the plan was for her to "read" to you, you got it all wrong. And so you get read to, in a gibberish language you cannot understand a word of, though there is much throwing around of arms and rolling of eyes and raising of eyebrows, while pages are turned at random, and we move from book to book really fast. And you thought you were a super-fast reader.

Her elder sister sees your bewilderment and translates for you. Apparently you have been listening to the story of the three little bears intertwined with stories from her everyday life. The fact that she cannot yet pronounce the sounds r, p, and ch and has to use other random sounds as substitutes, does not in any way slow down the machine-gun pace of the story-telling.

Kill them all with your tales, baby, kill them all. Your aunt strongly approves :)

Much later, another day, on the phone, she speaks to you - and you understand every word. And you feel kind of sad. She is crossing over, to our world, and will soon speak like the rest of us, her private language lost forever. At each frontier, you abandon something, to receive something new.