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School Days and Preschool Days, Too:
A treasury of anecdotes culled from my work and play as a preschool worker and an elementary school after- school activities supervisor
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 THE ANGST OF A THREE YEAR-OLD

    This might be a parable for the existential anxiety of every one of us. An adult, though, might not be as disarmingly direct as the little boy I found crying heartbreakingly in the large preschool sandbox area one chilly, winter day. He seemed terribly alone, though he was surrounded by other children.
       I was apparently the first teacher to notice this fellow. I approached him with all the kindness and caring I could and asked, bending down to his height, "Why, Randy, what's wrong?"
      Randy looked straight at me, still weeping copiously. With what seemed an utter, naked truthfulness, he replied, "I don't know!"  He seemed truly lost, there in that Sahara of a sandbox.
      I held Randy close to comfort him, then picked him up, put him on my lap, and talked to him for a few minutes. Shortly after I put him down, he started flailing his arms in the air.
     "I'm mad at you, cold wind! You're blowing too hard!" he shouted. "I'm going inside!" He turned and headed straight for his classroom.
      "Good!" I thought. My intuition had said Randy needed to be inside, but till he'd received my warmth, he'd not been willing to go.
      Fifteen minutes later I saw him—as is so common with children—back outside, laughing and playing as though nothing had happened.

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