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“Is it gonna be OK?”

We watched a particularly exciting kids’ movie last night, with much “danger” to our heroes. Lightning Bug is not used to such fare and curled in between Carol and me, her body tense, genuinely scared, asking “Is it gonna be OK?”

Photo by Eric Coble

And I flashed back to when I was about her age, watching the Disney animated “Robin Hood” with my mother – her first viewing, my second. In the climax heroic Robin disappears into a moat as arrows rain down on him; he disappears… and only his hat floats to the surface with an arrow in it. The music and images tell us he has finally been killed.

Little Me leaned over to my mother and whispered, “He’s not dead. It’s OK.”

And only as an adult do I realize how much my first viewing must have worried me, that I needed someone to tell ME it would be OK.

I look at much of the world today and feel the same way.

And of course no one can make that promise now, there are no all-knowing adults who can hold us and tell us to hang in there because it turns out fine.

But last night we could offer that to our daughter.

“It’s gonna be OK. Keep watching.”

And she did.

And it was.