Maggie's One-Liners

My daughter (yes, that title rolls off my lips with a smile) has an amazing way with words.  At first I thought it might be the collision of Ugandan English and American English that was causing vocabulary mix-ups and interesting word choices.  Sometimes that is true, but I've caught on to what is a misspoken sentence and what is intentionally intriguing.

What many of you may not know, is that I have spent a good chunk of my education in creative writing classes and poetry workshops.  Although the poet in me has somehow been hidden by a repainting of sorts, she chisels away at that paint incessantly.  Now, maybe some of the reason she resides beneath that exterior is because she hates the smell of criticism.  Critique smells salty and refreshing, like the sea just hours before a storm.  Criticism, however, is the stale afternoon when the storm has passed.  It wreaks of dead fish and decaying plant life.  It washes up all this junk on the sand that nobody even knew existed and clutters the beauty of what one came to see.  There is a flip side, I suppose.  The sea is an endless treasure chest.  Sometimes it takes the storm to loosen the treasure.

So, my daughter may have a gift with words and I sure hope that gift never gets sanded and repainted...and it never gets waved off by a bad smell.  Tomorrow, I will buy her a notebook to write down her beautiful words.  The most recent, and perhaps my favorite so far, happened on Friday as we were riding the Coronado Ferry back to Seaport Village.  Our family was in the bow of the boat alone.  Steve sitting on a bench with Perez on his lap and Maggie on my lap sitting next to them.  It was windy.  Maggie looks at the very tip of the bow where a flagpole held a large black flag with the name of the boat printed on it.

"Look, Dad.  The flag is dancing for us."


From America with love and imagery,
Ali