caution: sentimental post ahead

My nephew is five years old. And he is a holy terror. I mean it, he is. He's cute as can be, and believe me, he knows it and works it; but he is so hard to handle. (now.) (great, I have a Black Crowes song going on in my head now that will probably stick all morning.) I think it's the redhead in him; he has reddish brown hair, kinda like, hmm, an aunt of his I know. And that's just a sign of the devil. Right?

Anyway. The thing is, he really is a sweetheart at his core. Sure, that's not always apparent, what with his generally eardrum-splittingly loud, obnoxious, sly and surprisingly calculating for a five-year-old, belligerent nature, which I assume is a product of having testosterone in his body because I grew up with girls and seriously we just weren't ever that loud or bad or crazy, but in the middle of all that personality beats a sweet little heart, that at the most random times, can express a genuine love and thoughtfulness for others.

For example, last night's dinner blessing. Now normally my family doesn't say a blessing before dinner, except for I guess Thanksgiving and other occasional holidays and large family gatherings where, because of our upbringings, we'd feel like cads if we didn't offer one up, but blessings are apparently big with kids. They learn them in school, which to me seems like some kind of violation of the separation of church and state, but then again they go to a private school, so I guess that law doesn't apply to them. At any rate, my niece and nephew like to take turns saying a blessing before meals. The short and rhime-y kind. (Blessings, not meals.) And last night my five-year-old nephew shouted and hollered in all his belligerency that it was HIS TURN to say the blessing. So he did.

What he said was: "Thank you, God, for this good food, and for this happy day, make sure Brian is safe and sound, in Jesus' name we pray." Which is based on a blessing he learned in school, but which he changed a little bit for when he says it at home sometimes, on his own, without any prompting from anyone else, to include the part about Brian. Which my sister told me surprised her when he first did it, because it came from out of nowhere except his little brain.

What makes it sweet is, Brian is our really cool, nice, funny, awesome cousin, who right now is stationed in Afghanistan. He made it through his Iraq rotations just fine in the past, and we were all kind of thinking that he was maybe done with that, that he wouldn't have to go back, especially since we've got a new president who is scaling back our presence in Iraq and looking to end our (stupid-ass) mission there. But then he got new word, and now he is over in Afghanistan. Hopefully he'll be back by the end of this year, but I don't know for sure.

Well of course everyone in my family loves Brian and thinks about him and talks about him from time to time, with everything he's doing. And since my niece and nephew know and adore him, my sister explained to them when he had to go away again recently for such an extended period of time. I don't know how exactly she explained it to them, I know she said it very simply and kept it short. (I imagine it included the phrase "fighting for his country," but that's just me, picturing such a conversation in my head.) But I don't think anyone expected the kids to really think about or retain that particular knowledge, or expected that it would change in any way anything that they do or think.

But for whatever reason, maybe just because he loves his cousin, but somehow also I think because he picked up on the fact that we all have him in our thoughts, my little nephew incorporated thoughts of keeping safe and sound our cousin Brian, stationed in Afghanistan, into his prayers and blessings, all on his own, to the surprise of everyone else. Somehow a sentiment like that come from a child in such a way, all simple and sweet and easy and pure, holds so much more emotion than anything we could say as adults. And it makes this cynical old aunt go "awwwwwwww."