My pretty neighbor:

She smiled at me this morning and waved at me shyly through the window and it made my morning and I can't stop thinking about her the whole day!! But let me start from the beginning because like many stories already written and yet others still unwritten, this is a love at first sight tale.

I live in an apartment complex of 12 units on three floors. One of my neighbors is a real looker, a cutie pie as one of my brothers would describe her, and though I don’t see her many times, the few times that I do my heart skips a beat. As she passes close to me on those few occasions that our paths crisscross I can’t help but look admiringly and longingly at her. She is shy and bashful and there is always a hint of a smile playing on her pretty face.

She reminds me very much of others who have been in my life in the not too distant past in her innocence and pureness, unsullied as yet by the difficulties of life and seemingly ignorant of the rat race scurrying around her. Wherever I see her, strains of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t she lovely” belt out stereophonically and loudly through my head as I wonder where she has been all my life. I shouldn’t be having these thoughts because I am old enough to be her father, her grandfather perhaps god dammit! But I can’t help myself.

The other day she talked to me! This pretty face actually shyly looked me over and asked me a question and my knees buckled. Why me, me of all the neighbors in all the complexes in Nyeri, why did she choose me to have a brief conversation with or was it my lucky day or was this perhaps just a cunning plan to entrap me?

She was almost surreptitious in her approach to a conversation, unsure of whether I’d respond to her request. But it had happened because she needed my help; she needed my help to assist in a rather difficult and delicate task for her to retrieve something that had been dropped over a fence. The God's of fate had smiled down on me and put me in this envious situation .

You see she is not cut out for climbing over fences and gates and so on but I would do it in a heartbeat, in a jiffy even……and I did soaring over that fence almost as it wasn’t there. Carl Lewis that champion hurdler of yesteryear would have been proud of me. And after all, ladies should never ruin their trousers on account of such things when a gentleman is around!!

She had dropped something, a ball actually, and she needed it to be picked up and for her to go back home. I guess it is possible to accidentally drop something and then be unable to retrieve it hence asking a kindly passerby to do the gentlemanly thing and I happened to be that gentleman who was at the right place and at the right time………or maybe she was baiting me looking out for me to exit my house and then dropping something at that opportune time so that she could strike up a conversation with me, I will never know!

Suffice is to say that I was happy to have been of assistance and if I had been a puppy I would have been wagging my tail furiously a million times a minute secure in the knowledge that I had been of assistance however brief and fleeting it had been to this angel.

So who is this amazing human being, a little girl who can’t be more than 2 years old that lives in my complex but who has an amazing command of English in a grown up sort of way. I don't believe that I was as confident back in teh day as the three and four year olds I see nowadays loaded down with books (as I would imagine) in their back packs confidently believing all that their teachers tell them.

This little girl reminds me of my own daughters all those years ago just starting off in their journey through life innocent and pure in their thoughts and actions. One of them was so precocious and adventurous when young that she almost got lost at Heathrow Airport as we waited for our connecting flight as we proceeded on a family vacation, her older sister being less adventurous firmly seated next to me despite my entreaties to look our for her little sister. That's why I feel weak in the knees when I see these young ones and marvel at what comes out of the mouth of these babes and boys.

Enjoy your kids while they are young because soon they will fly the coop and become independent and free then you'll wonder where time went!!