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Fresh sweet corn, sandwiches made from our garden tomatoes.

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Ess wanted to wear a tutu on her walk.

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Ess got to wear her hair in a towel, just like Mama does when she’s done with her shower.

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Mykala and I were lucky enough to see another little sliver of Essie’s personality recently, and it started with a cookie. I was in the kitchen, Mykala was in the living room, and Ess was running back and forth between the two. I’d hand her cookie pieces: one for her and one for mama. She would then propel herself with a little bouncy toddler run into the living room where she and Mykala would eat their cookies. A few minutes later, Ess would reappear, requesting I fill her hands again. After a while, though, the routine was broken: Mykala watched Ess absentmindedly begin to eat some cookie, which caused Mykala to comment: “Oh, Ess, you ate my cookie piece.” It was merely a statement of what had transpired: no judgment or shaming could I detect in Mykala’s voice. But the effect (doubly unexpected given our toddler’s barely two years), was profound. Essie’s face immediately crumpled and her chewing slowed, when she realized that she could not un-chew what had been chewed. She could not, though her motions suggested she considered it, remove the cookie, dry it off, and put it into her mama’s unsuspecting hand. Realizing a decision gate had slammed behind her and lamenting Mykala’s loss, Ess began to cry, loudly. She cried and cried and cried until her eyes were bright red, holding Mykala as she did; a reaction totally disproportionate to what we had expected, yet only explainable by our daughter’s sadness at her mama’s loss. Small loss, big reaction.

We saw deep empathy in your tears, Ess.

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The year is 1943. The Supreme Court upholds the right to not say the pledge of allegiance in a classroom:

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

Think about how large World War II must have loomed in the minds of those deliberating, making, and contesting this case. When I imagine the historical context and see that the Right decision was still made, I have hope that the logic of freedom articulated in poetic prose above can move from government (where the stresses and strife of plebeian living is, however compassionately, imagined), to become the bedrock of the national conscience; not as a trickle-down but rather a river with many tributaries.

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