The Designer
“GG, what does ‘galore’ mean?” my granddaughter asks as I read the rhyming stanzas of Designed by God so I must be Special, a book I bought to share with her daddy almost thirty years ago.
“It means ‘lavish,’” I tell her.
She cuts her eyes and squishes her nose, “What’s lavish??”
“Like lots and lots and lots.”
She nods her head as if to say, “I got you.” So I read on.
“There are butterflies of every color, bunnies, frogs and puppies, too . . .” She points to the brightly colored pictures of the sights scattered across the pages almost as quickly as the words come out of my mouth.
“Designed by God so I must be Special", written by Bonnie Sose, illustrations by Bonnie and Holly Sose
I turn the page. “He gave me my nose so that I could smell all of . . .”
“GG!” Austyn interrupts, “these people don’t have noses!”
She was both accurate and prescient. The stick figure drawings with round eyes and upside-down-rainbow smiles were missing the central feature of their faces. It was a truth I’d somehow never noticed throughout the course of hundreds of reads. How on earth are people without noses supposed to smell?
Austyn was perplexed yet not deterred.
Snatching the nose off her face first and then reaching up and grabbing mine, she plopped her imaginary gifts to the page, giving the snoutless paper people what they had to have.
An astute observance followed by an easy fix.
Nothing clarifies like the eyes of a child.
Unfortunately, we grown-ups seem to have a way of convoluting things. So often the insulating years of life-experience prompt us to overlook and under-do. We see what we want to see or what we’re told we should see, and when we find a thing is missing, we look around for somebody to blame for the blunder. Or we throw the baby out with the lukewarm bathwater altogether. When faced with something we don’t understand, our go-to gut reaction is frequently fight or flight. We turn cruel or cut and run—neither being a strategy for learning or for growth, not to mention getting on down the road together to places we’d all like to go.
Time should make us wiser yet it seems, sometimes, to simply make us less aware. More stubbornly—often blindly—planted. Less and less willing to do whatever we can.
When Austyn and I neared the end of our read, I reached to close the book but was startled by her, “No no no no not yet!” Then she took my glasses, “I need to wear these, GG,” adding under her breath as if she sensed it was an important qualifier, “because my eyes are broken.” With the oversized frames dwarfing her face, she started at the beginning with made-up sentences delivered boldly at a lyrical pace, “God gave me flowers and birds and big trees and bees . . .”