T.

Have you ever notice that sometimes you can look in someone's face and see the child that they once were? And then there are those people in whose faces there is no remnant of child?

I looked at so many faces these past few days, and saw so few of the children these strangers once were. There was one couple — husband and wife — fifty-ish — and I could see with unquestionable clarity the little boy of five or six, in that man. His wife's face held nothing of her past, stripped clean, as it were. It was extraordinary, really, that each so clearly stated one or the other, and that each was so clearly opposite the other.

And I don't mean "baby-faced", as the saying goes. I mean that in certain people, there is the possibility of a glimpse of something from decades back, something still evident, a playfulness or an openness that so many of us lose, or, as a practice, send on its lonesome way.

Lovely, really.
The older the person, the more lovely.

I recall seeing it in my mother, in her gleeful moments, which were numerous.

And lucky I am, to remember it.