Last night we took the kids out to one of those kid friendly indoor play spots, the kind that have play structures that look like giant Habitrails. My son was both very eager and extremely terrified to play in it. He wanted to climb up, crawl through the maze of tubes hanging above our heads and whiz down the tunnel slide, but he was just too scared; he stood at the entrance sobbing and wavering and begging us to go up with him. "It's going to fall down. I'm afraid it's going to fall down. I need someone to go with me," he wept. (This in spite of the fact that having someone with him would have added weight to the tunnel, increasing the chances that it would actually do what he feared.)

Now, while my weight is more than double my son's 60 pounds (but, thanks to the Shangri-La diet, no longer triple!), I thought the tunnel was likely designed to hold that much anyway. What the tunnel really wasn't designed to hold was a full sized, unathletic, 40-ish adult with bad knees. So, there I knelt, at the entrance to the tunnel maze, trying to calm my weepy, excited, fascinated, terrified son, who would neither attempt to enter nor be distracted from his quest.

Other kids, most smaller than my son rushed and jostled past us. "Get out of the way," they said. They went up and down easily and happily. For them it wasn't a new experience or new experiences weren't terrifying. For my son, new is terrifying, and this was new; even though he has been in bigger play structures, he hadn't been in this particular structure before. That's when we met a boy I'll call Tim, who was about the same age as my son.

"Hey, is he scared?" Tim asked me.

"Yes," I said, "He wants to go up, but he's afraid to."

"Here, I can help. I think he'll listen to me, because," and here he did this cocky little thing where he put his head to one side, smiled and gestured toward himself, like a little Harrison Ford as Han Solo and said, "I'm a kid!" Then he looked at my weeping son and said, "Hey, it's ok. I'll go up with you. I was really scared the first time I did this too. But I just closed my eyes. And I did it. And now it's fun. Come on. You can hold my hand."

"It's ok, buddy," I said, "He can go up with you. He's the right size, and he knows how to do it."

"But I'm afraid it's going to fall!" my son wailed.

"Look," Tim said, smacking the support columns, "These hold it up, and they're really strong."

My son's tears stopped as his eyes traced the support column from Tim's hand up to the maze above. "Well, ok," he said in a quavering voice, and up the climbed together. When they reached the top of the slide, Tim pointed down to me and gave me the thumbs up. I waved. But my son balked again, afraid to go down the slide. Tim slid down to show my son it was ok, updated me on the situation and climbed back up to my again weeping son and climbed down with him.

"Good job, buddy!" I said, "You climbed up!"

"But is the slide going to be fast? I'm afraid it's going to be too fast!"

"It won't be too fast, buddy."

"No," said Tim, "All you have to do is sit. When you're sitting, you go slow, but if you lie down, you go fast. Just don't lie down. Here, I'll show you." And he demonstrated, sitting and lying on the slide, going up and sliding down so that my son could watch. "Here, now hold my hand. We'll climb up, and then just as slow as we went up, you can come down."

Up they went again, and down they slid together, and when he reached the bottom, my son beamed through his tears, "It wasn't too fast!" Then he and Tim went down again and again, easier each time, until it was time for us to leave. "See," Tim told me, "He just needed another kid to show him."

I could not thank that little boy enough or praise him enough to his mother. I didn't have words to tell them what it meant to me that instead of pushing past my son or making fun of him for being scared and crying, Tim empathized and helped; that instead of getting frustrated with my son's progress, Tim was patient with the setbacks and enthusiastic about the successes; that instead of just enjoying himself, he helped another little boy enjoy the evening too. Just to know that there are children like him, people like him, in the world is a gift. Thank you, Tim.