SOME KIDS ARE LUCKY AND SOME KIDS AREN'T LUCKY AT ALL

Oct. 9, 1997

Dear Sally,

The last time I saw Lily was July 1996. She was 7 months old. David and Chris' daughter is going on 2 now and knows me primarily as a stranger who's somehow connected to her "Man in the Moon" tea set.

She is so beautiful, all glistening eyes and stampeding feet. "I'm in love," says David, whose first reaction to the idea of adopting and becoming a parent wasn't quite so unconditional.

Lily is the apple, peach, pineapple of her father's eye.

She loves music, sometimes sitting at her father's feet while he plays the piano. On the piano bench herself, she splays her fingers over the keys like a real pianist.

"Thelonious Monk," her father says of her discordant noodling.

Lily's urgent pleas of "Mommy, mommy" seem to thrill Chris.

She's on a leave of absence from her teaching job to be home with Lily during her first few years. In the living room sits an appliance box Chris has fashioned into Lily's home within a home. On the harvest table is a small pumpkin she and Lily have supplied with eyes and ears and a mouth.

They might not think so, but kids are lucky to have a mom who's a teacher.

And some kids aren't lucky at all.

In California, DC worked with a woman who as a little girl had been assaulted by her father. She said she would go to school hoping someone there would help her but no one ever did.

As she grew older she realized that all the signs of abuse had been here but nobody paid attention or spoke up.

DC and some neighbors suspect two small children in our neighborhood are being abused by their mother. They've called the police, the Department of Family Services and a state child abuse hotline to complain about her but nothing appears to have changed.

When DC called a DFS official because she feared that one of the children was now wearing a cast due to this mother, she was told that the physician who set the break would have reported the injury if it had been the result of abuse. DC felt as if she were being accused of being a busybody.

We hear the woman yelling at the kids all the time and see her hitting them with a flyswatter. DC sometimes walks the dogs by the building at night and can hear the kids screaming from behind their closed door.

Kids scream, I say. Not like that, she says.

Last Saturday, I was driving back from Cairo in the middle of the afternoon when I noticed a van stopped on the other side of the two-lane highway. As I reached the van I saw a man standing beside it yank a young boy out of the back and begin hitting him.

In a split second the scene was gone. I was around a curve and the van was out of sight. If only there was someplace to turn around, I thought. He probably just lost his temper, I thought. He probably didn't really hurt him. My stomach made a knot.

I realized that this man's violent anger frightened me just as it surely did his child. I knew as little about handling it as that boy did.

I wish I had turned around, gone back and confronted the abuser. Let him be angry at me instead of a little boy.

Let this man know that mistreatment of children no longer will be tolerated. Let the boy know that no adult has the right to physically attack him.

As I drove down the road, I wanted to tell that little boy that people can help him. If only we would.

Love, Sam