It's amazing what's on kids' minds

The other day, Greta and I had just ended an expedition to one of Dedham's many fine Big Box Retail Outlets when she tripped and scraped her knee. Ow, ow, ow! I helped her hobble over to the car, and as we drove home, of course she cried and yelled about how much it hurt, poor thing. But she's one of these kids that, once she gets on a roll, she just can't stop, so soon she was complaining about everything else that was bothering her:

I'm hungry! I'm thirsty! Why'd they have to close Filene's, anyway? Why does Macy's buy all the good stores and close them down?

Um, what? She's upset about Filene's closing? What?

Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case, not exactly. What was really bothering her, I found out as she continued to wail, was how the closing of the Filene's at the Chestnut Hill Mall meant the closing of the little pedestrian bridge from the mall garage to the store.

Now to an adult, that news would be like, eh. But she's been going on that thing since she was an infant. In stroller days, we'd park up on that floor on purpose - then take the elevator in Filene's down to the mall. After she outgrew the stroller, she liked looking out the windows at the cars and people below as we walked (and if nobody else was around, we'd race from one door to the next).

To her, obviously, it's a big deal. And then I thought back and remembered when I was a kid how, whenever we drove from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I'd wonder how they fit the whole ocean in the giant brick box that was the last thing you saw before you descended into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (eventually, of course, I grew to learn that was no giant ocean tank, just a prosaic ventilation shaft).

So with any luck, the next time we go to the mall, we'll discover that the bridge is open again now that Bloomie's has occupied the old Filene's space. Because it's important.