My granddaughter Mia, who had just turned four, overheard me talking on the phone. Someone had drunkenly fallen asleep at the top of the outside steps leading down to our church’s shelter entrance. His body was blocking youth with no other place to sleep from being able to enter and access their beds.
The plight of people without homes is nothing new here in New York City, but it was new to Mia, who lives elsewhere. Somehow she gathered from my end of the conversation that someone was sleeping in an odd place. “Oma, where is the man sleeping?” I told her. “Why is he sleeping there?” I told her, more or less. Mia was silent. I figured she’d moved on, but no, she was considering this unusual fact. “Oma,” she finally said, “it was a cozy step.” The top step of the stairway had to be cozy, because Mia could not imagine anybody sleeping out in the cold on a hard rectangle of concrete. As anyone with a young child in their life knows, more questions ensued.
Mia herself beds down under a wavy sea of mermaids and fish, and when the lights are out she can look up and see a heaven of stars stuck onto her ceiling. One night when I was putting her to bed, the electricity went out. “Oma, the electricity of stars never goes out, does it?” she asked. I told her it doesn’t, unsure if stars could be said to have electricity and deciding it was not the moment to discuss black holes. I was lying on the covers next to her. “Oma, I have a mystery question. What does God look like?”
