You rarely hear the word “person” unless one is missing.
There are flyers all over New York at the moment for the missing person Avonte Oquendo. He is 14 and disappeared after leaving his Long Island City school on 4 October. He’s particularly vulnerable because he is autistic and mute. Seeing his face floating on those flyers is a reminder of the tragedy of his and his family’s situation, and also of the terribly thin line between being with those you love and losing them. Inevitably parents everywhere are imagining this happening to them.
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JNH usually asks for water soon after he has gone to bed. The other night I went in to his room to give it to him and he told me, sounding intrigued, “Mummy, someone’s having a bath. I can hear someone having a bath.” I had been running water for a bath. For a moment I thought how wonderful to be a child and fill your mind as you are falling asleep by the fact that you can hear someone running a bath. So little thought-clutter! Then I realized that it shouldn’t be difficult to pay attention to the sound of running water for a bath, or any other everyday sound. We’re perfectly free to do so if we choose.
On another night when I took him the water to drink, a wonderful phrase – more like a pronouncement: “Mummy, water and agua are not the same.”
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