The Gold Girl Diner
Sparkle Girl and Doobins were strapped in their seats in the back of my car.
We had just pulled out of my driveway when Bill Whitfield, who lives just above me, came along.
I stopped and rolled down the windows so that he could say hello to the kids. Bill was on Doobins’side of the car. If Doobins weren’t so cantankerous, he could easily build a substantial college fund by modeling, and, during the visit, Bill said, “That boy has the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen on a child.”
I didn’t want Sparkle Girl to feel slighted. So, after we pulled away, I said, “You have really beautiful eyes, too, sweetie.”
I need not have worried.
“I know,” she said. “He just couldn’t see them very well from where he was.”
At the age of 7, Sparkle Girl still has a wonderful innocence about her prettiness.
Sparkle Girl’s favorite restaurant is the Silver Diner. She likes all that chrome. So, before letting her pick where we’re going to eat, her mother and I check with each other to make sure that we’re both in the mood to eat there.
We were on our way there one night when Sparkle Girl said, “I wonder what it would be like if the Silver Diner was gold.”
Sparkle Girl is Sparkle Girl. But, in another world, she could be Gold Girl because she has blond hair. So I said, “When you grow up, you could open a gold restaurant and call it the Gold Girl Diner.”
She thought this was an excellent idea, and we spent the next few minutes imagining possibilities.
At the Silver Diner, the hostess gives kids a bundle of crayons and a picture to color when they come in. Sparkle Girl thought it would be great to give kids who came into the Gold Girl Diner a picture of her to color.
“Yeah!” we said.
Her mother and I threw in our ideas.
Hang pictures of her on the wall.
“Yeah!” she said.
Paint the backs of the chairs to look like her.
“Yeah!” she said.
“And, in the back,” Sparkle Girl said, “we could have a room where people could get tattoos of me.”
“Yeah!” we said.
Although, if the Gold Girl Diner ever comes to be, I might suggest that she make them temporary tattoos.
