Two Of The Same

Two Of The Same(Tom Di Roma) Two Of The Same

Emily was six when I wrote that poem for her. I was in New York’s Central Park, sitting against a tree, writing down my observations, when an elementary school class showed up at the pond in front of me. Immediately, their teacher or chaperone began lecturing to them about water fowl. The pond was teeming with birds.
Suddenly I noticed one little girl at the end of the group walking towards me. Stopping within a few feet, she asked, “Are you a writer?” I said I was. “Will you write something for me?”
Flattered but panicked, I wondered what I could possibly write on such short notice. Then I had an idea. First asking her name, I wrote:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sugar is sweet
And so are you, Emily.
Tearing the sheet out of my spiral-bound notebook, I handed it to her. You should have seen the look on her face as she ran back to the others, waving and shouting, “Look what he wrote for me!”
At the time, because I was a teenager who only recently had begun to write, I felt embarrassed. Don’t ask me why. So, collecting my stuff, I began to walk away. But not before I got one more look at the excitement on Emily’s face—a look I knew I’d cherish for the rest of my life.
Twenty years later, I was heading for the Planetarium next to the park to watch a laser light show. Since I had about twenty minutes to wait, I dipped into my backpack and pulled out the black paper bag that contained the reading material I had purchased earlier. That’s when I spotted another black bag. It belonged to a young woman, also fiddling with her backpack. When our eyes met, we sent a silent message to each other. It was a message that said we were two of the same—people who lived in a world of science fiction and/or fantasy. That’s because our bags could only have come from one place, The Science Fiction Shop in Greenwich Village. No other stores used black paper bags at the time.
Approaching each other, we began to talk and discovered that we were both successful authors. But that wasn’t the most amazing and mind-blowing part. It turned out this gal was now the grownup Emily for whom I had written that poem all those years ago.
Since that day, I’ve produced several stories about and for Emily; even some poems; one of which we used for our wedding vows while standing in front of that very same tree in Central Park.