Good News

I found a note today in my son’s pencil book. It had a drawing of a heart. Granted, if you had seen it, you would have thought it was a drawing of a circle with a dent in it, or a two headed sausage, but I know from experience that it’s a heart. “Oh that’s so cute”, I said to him. Then I added, “But you didn’t finish writing your whole name inside.” I handed him the note back with the heart with the letters JA in it; my son’s name has five letters, JA are the first two. He mumbled something I couldn’t really hear over the water running in the sink so I insisted, “Finish your name” (because in kindergarten, every moment is a teaching moment!).

He mumbled again, looking down at the kitchen table. I turned off the water to hear the mumbling clearly: “It’s not my name. It’s a J and an A inside a heart… an A for Alfonsina.”

Alfonsina Santiago. Listen to that name: built to blaze itself onto a young boy’s memory for all eternity. He is going to be moving on to 9th grade one day, smoking a joint with his boys, thinking I can’t smell it over the incense, blasting some Kanye West “classic hip hop”, musing on how “my first crush in kindergarten was this girl…Alfonsina, man. Alfonsina Santiago. She sat at my table.”