David Wylie

Everyone needs to have heroes.

Someone said that at a recent professional development conference. It could have been the Olympic gold medalist or the big shot chairman or one of the other speakers. It didn’t seem important enough to write down at the time.

But it resonated.

So here I am on Saturday morning thinking about that. I’m shooting the breeze with my daughters, 7 and 5:

“Oh, you like mermaids, do you?”

“Yeah,” says the seven-year-old.

“So what do you like better mermaids, or,” I pause to think of something remarkably important… “Unicorns?”

Her face screws up for a moment as her mind wrestles with that previously unconsidered question. Then she holds up two fingers on her left hand and one finger on her right. “They are both No. 1,” she declares, a connoisseur of mythical creatures.

I turn to her sister who repeats the same chain of events right down to the two fingers (middle and index) on the left and one on standing up straight on the right (flipping me the bird).

Heroes, I think, everyone needs to have heroes. For these two girls, it’s big sister playing hero to little sister, at least at this stage of their young lives.