‘This love’s for you’

For Christmas this year, I give you Lizzie Bogue.

Back in the 1980s, I was 20-something and new to a city for a job as a newspaper reporter. Lonely, I volunteered to teach Sunday school to first and second graders.

That’s how I met Lizzie. She was in my class.

And, oh my, was she precocious and chatty, given to expressions more profound than we expect from adults. She also was ever so tiny. And she was blind, her sight taken by the brain tumor that soon would take her life.

Four hundred people attended the funeral.

Afterward, I wrote her obituary. News stories, like bread, soon grow stale and are forgotten. Mine about Lizzie lingers in memory.

Among those I interviewed about Lizzie was an elementary school teacher. She remembered cradling Lizzie on a hip while at school. The child raised a tiny fist, then unfurled her tinier fingers and said:

“This love’s for you.”

Lizzie, so wee and wise. Today marks a child’s birth. May we – like that child and Lizzie – lead precociously, unabashedly with love.

Merry Christmas.