Delightful

I Am Bear Number Eighty-Eight. Delighted To Make Your Acquaintance.

The map had crumpled under Nelson’s daily touch, its pristine edges bent and smudged into comfortable guides to Baobabs and overnight resting places and the occasional village. In the month since their arrival in South Africa he had fingered it the way a small child fingers a blanket, at first excited by its revelations, later calmed by its consistency, and finally reassured by its mere existence.

Though Nelson trusted his map, he trusted the deepening of his own understanding even more. The map was, after all, just a piece of paper, a tool that aided his thoughts along their journey. Comprehending the laws of the land filtered his memories into lessons of success and failure, emphasized by scribbled notations in a tattered journal.

Nelson was a good friend and by all accounts a reasonable leader. As they traveled from place to place, he insisted that his companions learn all that nature had to offer. While they had seen many Baobabs, they had not found one they could all live in, but still Nelson pointed to each tree’s usefulness and beauty and always he remembered his mother’s request that he make a wish when he walked up to a new Baobab.

Everybody admired Nelson for his eagerness to learn. But when he laughed at his own ignorance, they liked him best.

“I feel like a dope;” he declared one day, “I am too young to count on experience and too old to count on advice. I have to adjust my approach at every corner. How am I supposed to delight a child if I know so little about its sorrow?”

This happened after they had spent the night near a camp for orphaned children. They weren’t ready to be friends yet, Nelson had said. They knew too little about comforting children who had lost their parents. While they gathered their belongings and piled them back on the shopping cart, one of the Bear girls, number fifty-five, asked Nelson for pencil and paper. She drew a circle of children dancing around a tree. It wasn’t a great work of art, but it made you pay attention and filled your head with happy thoughts.

“What made you do that?” Nelson wanted to know.

“Sheer delight!” she giggled, then added in a rather adult, lecturing voice, “Sorrow can sometimes be persuaded to step aside for a while.”

She watched Nelson frown. He always had to analyze everything.

“It’s a Bear thing, Silly,” she told him. “We are full of delight.”

“If it’s so easy, why are the others in Bear School right now?”

“Practice,” came the voice from behind a wall at the end of the playground. “Delight can be made better by practice.”

Nelson walked toward the wall. “Where are you? Who are you?”

“You ask too many questions. But I am delighted to make your acquaintance.” The Bear stepped out from her hiding place and curtsied in mock deference to the frowning Nelson. “I am Bear number eighty-eight. My friends and I skipped school today to chase after ….“

The last part of her sentence drowned in the spirited chatter of a gaggle of children running toward the playground. Some sat down at benches to eat lunch. Some tossed a ball between them. Some flung themselves into the faded and cracked plastic seats of a swing. A group of girls ran to the far corner where they joined hands and encircled the remains of a burnt out Baobab. They began to chant a familiar rhyme and soon they swirled around the tree trunk in a cloud of billowing skirts and happy voices.

One by one the Bears dropped what they were doing and came to the edge of the playground to watch the children. Number fifty-five and eighty-eight stood next to Nelson. As the dance became faster the two Bear girls smiled at each other, poked Nelson, and said in unison,

“Sheer Delight!”