Lotta Man (In That Little Boy)
Now playing: Craig Morgan – Lotta Man (In That Little Boy)
via FoxyTunes
His life is that blue bike, ball glove an’ fishin’ pole,
Tree-house, BB gun and band aid covered knees.
He does good deliverin’ papers,
An’ cuttin’ grass for the neighbours,
Except for Widow Wilson: he cuts hers for free.
His little hands do a lot for a kid his age,
He puts one-tenth of his hard earned money,
In the offering plate each Sunday by his own choice.
There’s a lotta man in that little boy.
Weekdays, he tries to sleep late:
Weekends, he’s up at daybreak.
Him an’ Roy wadin’ in Cotton Creek.
That dog was like his brother:
You’d seen one, you’d see the other.
Cut one an’ both of them would bleed.
Tires screamed, but that ol’ truck couldn’t stop.
There’s the tree that he buried him under;
He made a cross from scraps of lumber,
An’ on it carved: “God Bless ol’ Roy.”
There’s a lotta man in that little boy.
There’s a house, down where he goes fishin’:
He told his Mom: “Those kids got nothin’,
“And I don’t need all these toys.”
There’s a lotta man.
(There’s a lotta man. There’s a lotta man.)
In that little boy.
One of my favorite Craig Morgan songs. I’m always amazed at how children seem to act more grown up then adults a good amount of the time, and how infrequently adults seem to reconzie this. Children often have the answers to the questions that adults for some reason, can never figure out. We just have to listen.
Looking back on my work with children, I’m often reminded how easily they can take a situation that any adult would find difficult or confusing, simplify it and then look at you like “and you couldn’t figure that out?” I never punished or criticized them for doing this, in fact more often then not it made me laugh. Honestly, most of the time the answer had been right in front of us and yet in our adult world we couldn’t seem to figure it out. Looking back to a summer day years ago, a little boy just barley six years old had been left at the playground after school. The after school program I had been working for was getting ready to bring all the kids inside when another student came up and informed me the little boy had been forgotten by his mom and didn’t know what to do. Naturally, I took him inside with our group and made the appropriate calls as did the rest of the staff. At the same time saying to each other, how could someone do this to their own child. Now, not only did we have the issues of finding the parents and notifying police and social workers but here was this terrified little boy in a group of about 100 kids and adults he had never met before. So in our adult world we tried to think of everything that would make him feel better, find things he might like to do and try to reassure him everything would be ok when we all knew it wouldn’t. Half an hour later he was still visibly upset and we had little success trying to find something that he liked to do. That was until one of my other students, who to put it nicely was not known for his empathy towards anyone else said very simply “why don’t you just leave him alone and I’ll ask him if he wants to play a game.” I thought, well us crowding around him clearly wasn’t helping and our efforts to reassure him were getting us no where so I said, sounds like a good idea. Within 10 minutes the boy was no longer crying and getting ready to play a game with this other child, simply because in his mind playing with someone was enough to make him feel better. I realized then that no matter how many times we had tried to talk to him, try to explain what was happening or make him feel better that at that moment he needed to just escape from it. He needed that distraction to be able to handle the police bringing him home, and the social worker taking him away when he had got his things. Maybe whatever the other child said to him helped him as well, when you think about it, if all the adults in your life have never followed through or never been there for you what would make someone trust one they don’t even know? So in a matter of 10 minutes a child figured out a solution for a problem that the adults couldn’t seem to figure out in an hour. I had to laugh at that, our intentions were good and there’s no question we were trying to do what was best but sometimes your best solution is to look to other children for your answers. When the police arrived I watched as him and the other boy walked over to them together and before leaving, the other boy gave him a hug and said he would see him tomorrow. This coming from a child I had never seen show that kind of empathy towards anyone before, let alone hug another child. That right there showed a lot of man in that little boy.
