When You Are Four, and When You Are Five… and Then You Are Six

By Me…

When you are four, the world is your size.

Trees are big. Shoes are confusing. Sidewalks stretch like roads. And the girl across the yard, the one in the light blue dress with the short haircut and the gentle voice—she’s just the right size for your heart, even if she’s bigger than you.

Her name was Debbie. I called her my friend.

She lived near the edge of Nana and Pop’s property, off North Apple Street, in a house just beyond the crab apple tree—about ten yards or so past where the garden gave way to old fencing and strawberry rows. Her parents were kind, and they let us kids come and go, play in the yard, swing on the tree, laugh until we ran out of breath.

Debbie was older than me. Ten years, maybe more. But when you’re four, and she plays hopscotch with you like she means it, you don’t count years. You count jumps.

She never went to school like I did. I didn’t know why. She just didn’t. She waited for us at the bus stop sometimes, smiling like she had waited her whole day just for us to get back. And when she asked how school was, it was because she truly wanted to know. Every day, she’d ask again.

So when I was five, I started trying to teach her.

I’d bring my schoolwork. I’d hold up crayons. I’d spell out “D-E-B-B-I-E” on construction paper and ask her to do the same. I’d tell her “two and two is four,” then try again the next day.

But she didn’t remember. Or couldn’t. It was hard for me to understand why.

That’s when Nana sat me down, gently, and told me something I didn’t yet have words for: “Debbie’s special,” she said. I guess my Nana could see my confusion so she added “She’s retarded. She won’t learn the way you do. But she loves you.”

So the next time I saw Debbie, I asked her straight: “Are you retarded?”

She got a little quiet and said, “i Tink so.”

I said, “That’s okay. We’re still friends.”
And we were.

I never asked her to spell “cat” again. Never asked her what two plus two was. We just played. Red light, green light. Hopscotch. Swinging under the tree to the right of the sidewalk before Pop’s garden began. That swing was made for a kid my size but did not seem to matter.

And every year, on my birthday, Nana made me the same cake—lemon yellow with white frosting and coconut sprinkles. Debbie would come dressed up, her best light blue dress, a big smile, a lot of love. She brought her heart to the party, and that was enough.

There was something else I didn’t know—not until recently.

Debbie hadn’t learned to talk at all until just a few years before I knew her. My Aunt Pat, one of my mother’s best friends, lived right next door with her husband Charlie and their kids, Tammy and little Charlie. Tammy was a year older than me. She had wild red hair, freckles, and a bright, chattering voice. She was “my first friend.”

And it was Tammy—my friend—who first inspired Debbie to speak.

Debbie was ten years older than Tammy. But when Tammy began learning to talk, Debbie started to talk too—for the very first time in her life. She was 12 or 13 or so. That’s what makes it all the more precious: when I, a kindergartener, was trying to teach Debbie how to spell or count, I didn’t realize I was speaking to someone who had only recently begun to speak at all.

We eventually moved to jackson when i was about ten and Life went on. When ever I came back to Nana and Pop’s l would visit, but eventually Nana and Pop Sold their house and moved to a retirement village , But I never forgot Debbie

When I was older—grown, bearded, with daughters of my own—I came back to Lakewood one day and drove up to that same old house. Nana and Pop’s place was long sold. But Ethel still lived there. And Debbie was still inside.

I knocked on the screen door, the kind that squeaks with a spring, and said hello.

From the back, I heard, “Who’s that?”
“Come and see,” her mother said.

Debbie walked to the door, and it was like no time had passed. Same haircut. Same color dress. Same gentle face. She saw right through my beard and years and said, “You grew up.”

Then she smiled, opened her arms, and gave me the biggest hug.

As far as I know She never did learn what two plus two was. But she remembered me.

She always remembered me.

And that, I think, is love.

…But Greater Still Is His.

Debbie remembered me.

She remembered me when I had forgotten the very things I once tried to teach her. She remembered me when I had grown taller, older, bearded, tired. She remembered me when I didn’t deserve remembering.

And in that embrace—so simple, so unearned—I saw something far bigger than the moment.

I saw a glimpse of how God sees me.

Because the truth is, I am not the teacher in this story. I am not the helper, or the guide. I am the one who barely understands. The one slow to learn. The one who forgets, who wanders, who stumbles and stammers and speaks out of turn. I am the one with all the limitations—more than Debbie ever had, really.

And yet…
God remembers me.

“For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.”
—Psalm 103:14

He bends down. He stoops low. He condescends to men of low estate.
He, who numbers the stars and calls them by name, also numbers the hairs on my head—and the tears I’ve shed.

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
Psalm 8:4

I don’t have a worthy answer. But I have this story. And I have that hug. And I have the cross—where the Son of God remembered me, even then.

We may spend our lives trying to spell things we barely understand. We may forget the simplest truths, like “two and two is four.”

But God remembers. He never forgets His own. Not one.

Not me.
Not Debbie.
Not you.

And that, I know now, is Love.