Little child in a grocery cart, in a grocery aisle, smiling at the camera
Photo by Jomjakkapat Parrueng on Unsplash

Famous as the one who smiled back

On reading. “Famous,” by Naomi Shihab Nye

To get to the ocean from my home in Takoma Park, Maryland, I drive over a famous bridge – the four-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The trip is 125 miles from here to Cape Henlopen, but if you say “the bridge” to anyone between here and there, they know which one you’re talking about. It’s impressive and lovely.

But there are dozens and dozens of bridges along that route. Many of them are so small they go unnoticed as we zip along, yet each one is absolutely essential. We would never ask which bridge makes it possible to get there, because they all do, famous or not.

In our lives, we are building or maintaining bridges all day long, even, as in this lovely poem, when we smile back at sticky children in grocery lines.

That sort of fame – the kind that makes a tot kick his feet happily in the shopping cart – is not spectacular, but it’s just the sort of little bridge that keeps us all moving toward a better day.

– Dennis Huffman, Advisor, Building Bridges Word by Word

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952. She has published many poetry collections as well as novels and short stories. “Famous” is from Words Under the Words (1995).

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