You Never Know What a New Day Will Bring

By Sally Wendkos Olds

I was just finishing my morning coffee today when I heard a child crying in the corridor. So far as I knew, there were no children on my floor, and I was just about to look out to see what was happening when I heard a light tap on the door. I opened it to find a young woman, a big dog, and a little boy about 3 or 4 years old. The only one I recognized was the dog. The young woman, Alyssa, was walking him for her relative who lives down the hall. The little boy had been wandering the halls and seemed to want to come into my apartment. He was barefoot, wearing only a shirt and underpants, and apparently lost. I live in an apartment building with three towers comprising some 800 apartments, and I had never seen him before.

Alyssa and I both asked his name, but he wasn’t answering, and when he did speak, we couldn’t understand him. Since many of my neighbors come from other countries, I thought maybe he wasn’t speaking English. What to do? How to reunite him with his family? I phoned the front desk down in the lobby, and when Tony, our concierge on duty this morning, heard that he was in my apartment, he said he would find his mother, who had been going up and down all 24 floors of our tower, looking for him. A couple of the building’s porters were also going up and down the stairs. Tony said he would call the mother and tell her to come pick him up.

Meanwhile, he was an unhappy little guy who didn’t express any interest in the cookie I gave him in the time-honored grandmother therapy for unhappy children. And it was taking what seemed like a long time for his mother to come. She had run out of her apartment without her cell phone when she heard the elevator going, didn’t know where her son had gone in it, and had frantically gone searching.

He was one overjoyed child when she came in and took him in her arms. She told us that he is autistic, which explained his inability to communicate with us. Fortunately, though, he did relate to his mother and folded himself into her loving arms, feeling rescued.

So that was this morning.

Yesterday morning I went to my computer about 7 o’clock and found a message from my youngest daughter asking me to call her when I woke up. Since it was my birthday, I thought she wanted to sing to me. But no, it turned out quite differently — she had slipped and fallen and hit her head against the metal drawer pulls of her dresser when she went to get out of bed in the middle of the night, now had a huge bump on her head with an accompanying headache, and thought she might have a concussion.

Several phone calls later, after she went to a neighborhood urgent care center (which I had recommended since I had had a good experience with one after my granddaughter had been in a taxi accident and cut her chin), she emailed to tell me she had been checked out, all her vital signs were normal, the doctor had told her she could go back to sleep and just to be watchful for any troubling symptoms.

So that was yesterday.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

Sally Wendkos Olds is an award-winning journalist, author, and speaker with 11 books to her credit as well as more than 200 articles published in major magazines including Woman’s Day, Redbook, Working Woman, Ms., New York Times Magazine, Newsday Magazine, New Woman, Self, Good Housekeeping, Parents’, Reader’s Digest, Family Health, and Seventeen, among others. Her travel articles have appeared in The New York Times and other major newspapers, and her work has been reprinted in many textbooks and anthologies. Please visit http://sallywendkosolds.com/.