Sorry, This Lap Is Taken!

Random awkward encounters with people 12 and under.

The girls and me in Marrakesh (left) and Sarajevo (Photos from my personal collection)

I like to think I can hold my own in the company of strangers, but it’s an art that took me decades to master. When I did, it was mostly out of necessity: It would be hard to be an effective journalist if I couldn’t carry on conversations with people I don’t know. So I’ve learned to fake it, although underneath the gregarious, loquacious exterior, I’m still the shy kid who used to be too terrified to say a word in class.

I don’t remember talking to people who weren’t in my family until I was well into second grade. That was also when I had my first public speaking engagement: reciting all 39 presidents (we were only up to Jimmy Carter at the time) in front of the other second-grade classes. At least I had a script — even if 7-year-old me managed to mangle a few presidential surnames anyway. To this day, I wonder if the teachers were smiling at my brilliance or laughing on the inside at what I did to “Buchanan” and “Eisenhower.”

At least I was talking in school, which was a totally new experience for me. The silent treatment I’d given pretty much everyone at Highlands Elementary up to then had made it hard for me to do as I was told the previous school year when my first-grade teacher asked me to tell a classmate on the playground that she wanted to speak to him. I slowly walked over to the kid on the monkey bars as if I were headed toward the gallows. When I reached my dreaded destination, I didn’t say a word. I just pointed at my classmate and then to the teacher. It took him a few beats to get the gist of what I wasn’t saying, but when he finally did, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Phew!

Considering my shy past (and present), it’s no wonder I’m so impressed by outgoing kids. But with the exception of my 2 1/2-year-old godson Isaiah, who has never met a stranger he won’t engage, they kind of scare me, too. This is especially true of the little ones who are bold enough to approach grown-ups and carry on full conversations with them, like the sweet kid who once crawled over to me at a mall in Windhoek, Namibia, while I was sitting on a bench scribbling notes.

I can’t say I’ve ever been particularly comfortable around children. Maybe it’s because…