By: Liz Sgro

I remember stepping down the winding stairs leisurely, trying to make time slow down so I could get one last glimpse at the captivating art displayed on the second and third floors of the Artists Alliance Gallery. As I came to terms with finally leaving the last step and moving closer to the exit on the first floor, I saw a girl on a counter next to a woman checking out customers from the gift shop. Just as I was finished analyzing the painted symbolizations of hope, poverty, gratefulness, courage, family, and other aspects of life in Ghana, I ran into these concepts again but in the form of a living breathing little human. The girl had a pink top and bright yellow pants on. As a fellow girl who loves a good pair of fun colorful pants, she earned my respect instantly. I made eye contact with her as I descended. I smiled, lifted a hand sign that signaled that her pants were cool and that I was a fan, then turned around and headed to a corner of the gift shop.

I began to look in a bowl of carved colorful rocks and suddenly a little hand from behind poked through and brushed mine in the bowl. I looked down to see Little Miss Yellow Pants grinning ear to ear at my over-dramatized shocked face. I’ve always prided myself on my range of facial emotions but no one gets as much enjoyment out of my silly faces as little kids do. I leaned down to introduce myself. She didn’t respond with anything but a bigger and cheesier smile. She couldn’t have been more than five years old and probably was not being taught English at home so I figured she either didn’t understand me or was a little frightened by a stranger making faces at her. Either way, I kept talking with her and she used her body to motion her responses. She picked up a rock from the bowl and put it in my hand. I silently screeched in excitement and put it back. She handed me two more. I put them back. This became a pattern so I started counting aloud as I put them back. By the time we reached ten rocks, she started repeating after me. Her first words to me. I knew she was just mimicking my sounds but I was so proud that she was counting out loud with me in English. I picked her up and swung her around. She squeezed me right back.

I put her down, she wrapped her hand around one of my fingers and she began bringing me around the gift shop. She pointed to new beads and rocks. Her favorites were these colored translucent beads that hung off of the window facing the ocean. They varied in shapes and sizes and slightly clunked together as an occasional gust of wind from the water would breeze in and swirl through our hair. We watched as the sun shone through them and made the room dance in color as if we were looking through a kaleidoscope. Little Miss Yellow Pants was overwhelmed with excitement, as was I. She rushed out of the gift shop and dragged me across the building with her to another room that displayed more masks with baskets on one wall, fabrics and kente on another, and grand floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the rolling waves on the other. She reached her arms up signaling for me to pick her up. She pointed at things around the upper half of the room that she wanted me to show her. No matter if it was a misconstrued statue, fish head, fedora, mannequin, or a piece of colorful cloth, she would pet it as if it was an animal in an aquarium touch tank. I would tickle her and tell her how cool it was. No response, just more smiling, giggling, and pointing. Since she was a little human who probably hasn’t seen the majority of things above three feet high, I felt like I was showing her a new world in a place where she has grown up. Even though there were no colorful beads in this room, her face and the gentle sound of her laugh began to light up the room just the same. Like a kaleidoscope. I saw in her eyes that a simple point and stroke of a dusty antique opened her eyes to so much more than she dreamed of and I could not be more honored to have been her guide through that.

In the background of this magical moment, I faintly heard that my group was beginning to depart. I walked Little Miss Yellow Pants back to her counter she was sitting on next to the woman who I assumed was her mother. After reluctantly releasing her grip from around my neck, she flailed, pointed to a container of pens, and waved a scrap piece of paper on the table. I looked at Little Miss Yellow Pants and her big doe eyes and told her to not let anyone tell her she wasn’t cool. I repeated the word a few times and she said it back. Cool. I wrote it down on the paper followed by a smiley face. Remembering how sentimental I was as a little girl, I would’ve folded that paper up and kept it in the back of some memory bin for years only to find it and remember this type of interaction years later. I hoped that she would do the same.

I held up an ‘okay’ sign with my pointer finger and thumb touching as my other three fingers sprung up just as I did when I initially came down the stairs. She couldn’t figure out how to configure her hand that way so, after a few failed attempts, we gave up and laughed. I gave her a hug and I started towards the door. The room got darker as my eyes began to adjust to the approaching shining sun on the bright white shelled path by the bus. Before I took my last step out of the building, I turned around in the same cheesy way they do in the movies and was hoping to see one last grin from Little Miss Yellow Pants. Just as the room had fully dimmed, the sun stroked her face, the kaleidoscope began to fill the whole exhibit, and I saw something even better: a small shadowed ‘cool’ hand sign.