The Viral Kids Who Stole Steve Harvey’s Heart: Two Little Girls Who Preached Jesus, a Grandfather Who Got a Second Chance, and a 5-Year-Old From Fargo Who Counted 193 Licks The Most Unforgettable Show Steve Harvey Ever Did
The video was forty-seven seconds long.
Two little girls. A phone camera. A living room somewhere in America with a couch visible in the background and the particular afternoon light that comes through blinds when someone is filming something they did not plan to film.
The older one spoke first.
She was maybe seven, maybe eight, with the confident posture of a child who has been told she is smart enough times that she has started to believe it — which is exactly the right number of times to tell a child.
“There’s a lot of things going on in the world,” she said. “Here’s some advice.”
She paused for effect. An actual pause. A comedian’s pause.
“Call Jesus.”
The younger one nodded beside her like a co-anchor confirming breaking news.
“Things aren’t working out at your job?” the older one continued. “Call Jesus. Things aren’t working out at your school? Call Jesus. Things aren’t working out like anywhere?”
Another pause.
“Call Jesus.”
She looked directly at the camera with the unflinching eye contact of someone who has absolutely no doubt about the quality of her advice.
“Everybody needs a little Jesus now and then in their heart.”
The younger one was still nodding. Slowly. Deeply. The nod of a person listening to a sermon they have already memorized.
And then — just when the video seemed like it was wrapping up, just when you thought you had seen the whole thing — the older girl leaned slightly forward.
“If your boyfriend break up with you,” she said, “call Jesus.”
She raised one finger.
“Don’t call Tyrone.”
She pointed at the camera.
“Call Jesus.”
That video got millions of views in under a week.
Not because it was cute, though it was. Not because children saying serious things in serious voices is inherently funny, though it is.
It got millions of views because those two little girls said something true.
Not theologically true, necessarily. Practically true. Emotionally true. The kind of true that makes you laugh and then, two seconds later, makes you think — and the thinking is the part that stays with you.
Don’t call Tyrone.
Call Jesus.
There are people watching that video who have called Tyrone. Who have called the wrong person at two in the morning and said the wrong things and woken up the next day with the specific regret of someone who should have called Jesus — or at minimum, should have waited until morning.
Those people hit the share button harder than anyone.
Steve Harvey saw the video on a Tuesday.
He watched it twice.
Then he did what Steve Harvey does when something is too good to just appreciate privately.
He picked up the phone and made a call.
Two weeks later, Dani and Dana walked out onto the stage of The Steve Harvey Show in matching outfits, with the energy of two people who knew they were ready for this moment and had been ready, honestly, for most of their lives.
The audience was already on its feet.
Steve Harvey stood up from his chair, which he does not always do, which means something when he does it.
“How you doing?” he said, grinning.
“Good,” said Dani.
“Good,” said Dana.
“Y’all sit up here,” he said, gesturing to the chairs.
And then Dana — the younger one, the nodder, the co-anchor — stopped moving. She smoothed her skirt and crossed her ankles with the precision of someone who had been practicing this exact move.
“Mr. Harvey,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I cross my legs like this.” She demonstrated. Perfect posture. Ankles precisely together. “Because I’m a lady.”
The audience lost its mind.
Steve Harvey put his hand over his heart.
He had been on television for decades. He had interviewed celebrities and politicians and athletes and people whose stories had broken the hearts of entire studio audiences.
And a child had just taught him something about grace.
They did not just come to be cute.
They came to work.
The format was simple: audience members with questions would come to Steve Harvey, and Steve Harvey would turn to his new co-advisors and say — go ahead, what do you think?
The first question came from a woman named Tanya.
She was the mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter, and the problem was one of those problems that sounds like a compliment until you think about it for more than ten seconds.
“We hang out all the time,” Tanya explained. “People don’t know I’m her mother. They’re always hitting on her.”
She paused.
“Is it too early for my seventeen-year-old to have a boyfriend?”
Steve Harvey looked at Dani.
Dani thought about this with the seriousness of a judge reviewing evidence.
“You can do what my mom does,” she said, “and put her hair in two ponytails so she looks like a child.”
The audience erupted.
Steve Harvey sat back in his chair and laughed the kind of laugh that takes your whole body.
Because the advice was ridiculous and also, somehow, not wrong. The instinct behind it — protect her by making her look younger, make her less of a target — was the same instinct that has driven parents for generations. Dani had just expressed it with the directness that only a child can get away with.
“What I would do,” Dana added, not to be outdone, “is just give her a shirt that says: Hey, back off. She’s only seventeen.”
More eruption.
More laughter.
More Steve Harvey sitting back with the expression of a man who is genuinely delighted.
The second question came from a woman named Carla.
Four years single. Open to meeting the right person. But every time a man approached her, the opening line was some version of: Hey. Yo. What’s up, girl.
One word. Maybe two. Delivered with the enthusiasm of someone who had not particularly planned to say anything at all.
“What should I respond to these men who are lazy with these comments?” Carla asked.
Steve Harvey turned to Dani.
Dani did not hesitate.
“You should just ignore him,” she said. “Then he’ll come crying back.”
She said it with the certainty of someone who had run this experiment and verified the results.
Steve Harvey waited a beat, expecting more. An elaboration. A secondary strategy. A footnote.
Dani looked at him calmly.
That was the whole answer.
Ignore him. He’ll come back crying.
“I thought she had an add-on,” Steve said to the audience, slightly amazed. “But I guess she went — uh-uh. That’s it.”
He turned back to Carla.
“Yes. Ignore them. And they will come crawling back.”
Two sentences. Both of them from an eight-year-old. Both of them correct.
Here is what was happening in that studio that nobody said out loud but everybody felt.
There is a specific kind of wisdom that children have access to that adults have mostly trained themselves out of.
It is not sophisticated wisdom. It is not nuanced wisdom. It does not account for complexity or context or the full range of human emotional experience.
But it is direct.
It goes straight to the thing.
An adult, asked what should I do when a man sends me a lazy one-word message, would likely give you a four-part answer involving self-worth and communication styles and what you want long-term and how to identify genuine interest versus performative effort.
An eight-year-old says: ignore him.
And the eight-year-old is not wrong.
The adult answer is fuller. More complete. More useful in the long run, probably.
But there is something in the child’s answer that the adult answer does not have.
Confidence.
The child is not hedging. Not qualifying. Not saying well, it depends or every situation is different or you might want to consider.
The child says the thing.
Clean and clear and without apology.
Dani and Dana left the stage the same way they arrived.
Together. Matching. With the self-possession of two people who knew they had done their job well and were not particularly seeking validation about it.
The audience gave them a standing ovation.
Steve Harvey watched them go with an expression that was half amusement and half something deeper.
He had spent most of his professional life being the person in the room with the most conviction. The loudest voice. The one willing to say the uncomfortable thing with complete certainty.
And these two little girls had walked onto his stage and matched him beat for beat.
Call Jesus. Don’t call Tyrone. Ignore him. He’ll come crying back.
Short sentences. Maximum impact.
Steve Harvey, for once, had almost nothing to add.
The second story came from a phone.
Like almost everything viral comes from now — a phone, held by someone who was not planning to capture anything important, just documenting a moment because that is what people do now, we document moments, we hold up the camera and hit record and most of the time nothing happens and sometimes everything happens.
Colette Collins had been filming her father saying goodbye to her daughter.
That was the whole setup.
A grandfather. A toddler. A front door or a driveway or wherever goodbyes happen at the end of a visit.
The grandfather — Tony — bent down to give the little girl a kiss.
“Mwah,” said Cami, the toddler. She was maybe two and a half. Round face, enormous eyes, the total absorption of a child who is entirely present in every moment because she does not yet have the capacity to be anywhere else.
“I got it,” Tony said.
“I got it,” Cami repeated.
“See you later, baby.”
“See ya later.”
A pause.
And then, in the small, unguarded voice of a child who does not yet fully understand what later means or how far away it might be:
“I hope I see him.”
Ten million views in one day.
That is the number.
Not ten million over a week. Not ten million over a month. Ten million in a single day, people watching a grandfather and a toddler say goodbye at a doorway, a child saying I hope I see him in the tone of voice that means she is not entirely sure she will.
That video traveled because it named something.
Not something unusual. Something universal.
The specific ache of leaving someone you love. The particular anxiety of the goodbye that might be longer than you planned. The way children, who have not learned to perform composure, will say directly what adults have learned to swallow — I hope I see him — and in saying it directly, will crack something open in everyone who hears it.
Everyone who has ever stood at a door watching someone leave and thought: I hope I see them.
Everyone who has.
Colette brought her father and her daughter to the show.
Tony Collins walked out looking like a man who was still slightly surprised by his own story.
Not by the viral video. By everything that came before it. By the fact that he was here at all — on a stage, in a suit, with his daughter beside him and his granddaughter in his arms — when twenty years ago, by his own accounting, he should not have been anywhere near any of this.
He had grown up in a family of sixteen.
Sixteen people. A small town in upstate New York. The specific kind of childhood where you learn early that resources are not infinite, that you have to push for what you want, that the way out is through.
His way out was football.
He had the talent. He had the work ethic. He made it — actually made it — to the NFL, which approximately 1.6 percent of college football players ever do. He had achieved the thing that millions of young men dream about and almost none of them reach.
And then, in his second year in the league, he got addicted to painkillers.
The progression happened the way these progressions always happen.
One thing led to another and another and another, and each step felt like a logical response to the step before it, until you are standing somewhere you never meant to be and the path back to where you started has completely disappeared.
Painkillers to marijuana.
Marijuana to cocaine.
Cocaine to a suspension from the NFL.
A suspension to losing everything.
“Everything,” Tony said, sitting across from Steve Harvey, his voice steady but carrying the particular weight of a word that has been carried for a long time. “I totally lost everything.”
Steve Harvey nodded. He did not say anything yet.
“When Colette was this age” — Tony looked at his granddaughter Cami — “I wasn’t a good father.”
“When your daughter was?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t a good father.”
He paused.
“God spared my life. Gave me a second chance.”
Here is where the story turned.
Here is the detail that stops you.
Tony was describing how much Cami looked like Colette as a baby. How if you put a photo of the two of them side by side, at the same age, they are almost indistinguishable.
“They look exactly alike,” he said.
“They look exactly alike now, Jesus,” Steve said.
Tony smiled. A real one.
“God gave me another chance,” he said, “to see Colette grow up again.”
That is the sentence.
That is the one.
Read it again if you need to.
God gave me another chance to see Colette grow up again.
Not a metaphor. Not a comfort. A literal second chance — his granddaughter, the image of his daughter, appearing in his life at the age when he missed everything the first time.
The universe offering a redo.
A do-over that looked exactly like the original.
Steve Harvey leaned forward.
“Why weren’t you a good father?” he asked. “What was it?”
“I was on the road a lot playing,” Tony said. “And also with the drugs. I remember the times when Colette used to run after me. But I was chasing a drug.”
He stopped.
“I’m so thankful now. Because God has given me a second chance. I need to tell my story. Let people know. So other kids don’t have to go through what I went through.”
He looked at Steve.
“I know a lot of kids got the same goals I had.”
Steve Harvey did not respond to that the way a polite television host responds to a guest’s emotional moment.
He did not nod warmly and say thank you for sharing that and pivot to the next segment.
He leaned in.
“I got a mentoring camp,” Steve said. “I talk to young men all the time. And one of the things I keep running into — they say: yeah, Mr. Harvey, you’re older, you don’t understand.”
He paused.
“Tell me what I don’t understand. Please. Tell me what part of this trip of manhood you own that I don’t understand. Give it to me. Because I have been on all of them.”
The audience was quiet.
“Every young man — I don’t care who you are — if you have an aspiration to be a man, you are going to have to get to this point right here.”
He gestured at Tony. At Colette. At Cami.
“Anything else, you fall short. It ain’t complete until you have children. Until you put somebody’s daughter up on a pedestal and treat her as a queen. Until you have a family that you are in charge of. That is manhood.”
He let it sit.
“No matter how corny it sounds. This is what you have to get to. This is the ultimate goal. This is the proving ground.”
What Steve Harvey said next is the kind of thing that gets quoted.
The kind of thing that gets screenshot and shared and put on top of stock photos of sunrises and posted with the caption facts or this right here or just the fire emoji, which is how people now express that something has burned through the noise and landed.
“Anybody can be a father,” Steve said. “It takes a special man to be a daddy.”
He looked at Tony.
“You can be a father and be nowhere. You can be a father and be absent. You can be a father biologically and have no connection to the thing you helped create.”
He paused.
“But when you’re the daddy — when you’re showing up, when you’re putting it in, when you’re on the floor with the tiara at the tea party — that’s manhood. You have to get to this. Go be somebody’s daddy. Go be somebody’s husband. Go try that. If you do that well —”
He exhaled.
“You gotta fight for that.”
Colette Collins had been listening to all of this.
She was sitting beside her father and her daughter, and she had the expression of a woman who has spent a long time holding two things at once — love and pain, forgiveness and loss — and has arrived, somewhere along the way, at something that looks like peace.
Steve turned to her.
“How does it feel, watching your dad’s relationship with your daughter?”
Colette smiled.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “The love they have for each other — there are no words for it really. Because this is her best friend. They are legit best friends. They do everything together.”
She paused.
“We live about three and a half hours from each other. So they can’t see each other all the time. But when they do, my dad is on the floor with a tiara and having tea parties and they’ll play all day.”
She looked at her father.
“He may have missed out on things with me. But to see it now with them — I’ve forgiven. I love my father. I always felt love growing up. And just to see it now with them — it means the world to me.”
There are not a lot of moments on daytime television when a studio full of people goes entirely, genuinely quiet.
Not politely quiet. Not the quiet of an audience following the cues.
The quiet of people who have stopped performing their reaction because something real has walked into the room and taken up all the space.
That was this moment.
A daughter telling her father, on national television, that she forgave him.
Not because he asked. Not in response to an apology. Just as a statement of fact. I forgive you. I love you. You missed things with me. But look at what you are now.
Tony Collins sat in that chair and received it.
The way you receive something you have wanted for a long time but were not sure you deserved.
He had written a book.
“Broken Road: Turning My Mess Into a Message.”
Steve asked him about it.
“When you’re about to die,” Tony said, “and I was about to die — I had overdosed. I’m laying on the ground and I cry out to God: God, I don’t want to die like this. I said it twice. God, I don’t want to die like this.”
He paused.
“My heart started calming down. But it was too late — the ambulance had already gotten there. Took me off to the hospital. And then I’m on ESPN: Tony Collins overdosed.”
He looked at Steve.
“But that’s what the devil tried to do to you. For me, it’s like — I have to do everything I possibly can to help other people not go through what I went through.”
He looked at his hands for a moment.
“When you find out what your gift is — that’s a gift. But you have to give that gift away.”
Steve Harvey nodded slowly.
He had been nodding through most of this conversation the way a man nods when he recognizes something.
Not agrees. Recognizes. The nod of someone who has thought about this before and is hearing it expressed in a new way that matches what he already knows.
“Your career is what you’re paid for,” Steve said. “Your calling is what you’re made for.”
He looked at Tony.
“You needed all those moments. Because if you hadn’t been through them, you ain’t got a book. You ain’t got a story. You can’t help nobody. Hard to be the swim coach if you can’t swim.”
He paused.
“You had to go through everything you went through to get to this point right here. Now the version we got is the version we need. But you needed to be laying on that floor that day.”
Tony nodded.
“You know what church folks say?” Steve continued. “You can’t have a testimony without a test. Because what are you going to tell me otherwise? You can tell a person how to get over if you’ve been under. You can tell them how to get up if you’ve been down. You can tell them how to win if you’ve done lost. You can’t have these conversations with nobody if you haven’t been somewhere.”
He sat back.
“I love your story.”
And then Steve Harvey looked at Cami.
Who had been sitting through all of this — through her grandfather’s confession, through her mother’s forgiveness, through Steve Harvey’s sermon on manhood and calling and testimony — with the alert, interested expression of a toddler who is taking in information she does not yet have the context to fully process but is storing somewhere for later.
“Cami,” Steve said.
Her head came up immediately. Eyes wide. Present.
Everyone in the studio laughed.
There is something about a small child responding to her name with absolute full attention — no hesitation, no looking around to confirm she was the one being addressed, just immediate eye contact — that is both funny and moving at the same time.
This is who she is already, you think. Fully here. Fully present. Not looking at a screen, not distracted, not performing attention. Just actually there.
“Cami,” Steve said again, still smiling. “What do you call your granddad?”
Cami looked at Tony.
“Papiere,” she said.
“Who?”
“Papiere.”
Steve repeated it back to her slowly, like tasting a new word.
“Papiere?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “That’s what she calls me. Started when she was first learning to talk. Whatever she was trying to say, it came out Papiere. And so —”
He shrugged.
“That’s who I am now.”
Papiere.
Not grandfather. Not grandpa. Not the name he gave himself or the name his family gave him.
The name a toddler gave him when she was reaching for language and landed on something entirely her own.
And he took it.
He took the name a two-year-old invented and he wore it without embarrassment or qualification, because when someone you love gives you a name — even if the someone is not yet three years old and still working out how words are supposed to sound — you wear it.
That is the thing.
Papiere.
It was on the video that got ten million views. A grandfather saying goodbye to a toddler at a doorway.
See ya later, Papiere.
I hope I see him.
Ten million people watched a child say those five words and felt something move in their chest.
Because the thing that child was expressing — I love this person. I’m not ready for this goodbye. I hope the world is kind enough to give me more time with him — is not a child’s feeling.
It is everyone’s feeling.
Children just say it out loud.
Steve told Cami about the gift.
A thousand-dollar gift certificate from Belk, because of course you give a toddler a thousand-dollar gift certificate — give her something real, something she can use, something she can hold.
“Toys?” Cami said, when he mentioned it.
“Toys,” Steve confirmed.
She looked satisfied with this answer.
“But make sure you share it with your mom and your granddad,” Steve said, “so they can shop too.”
Cami considered this.
The consideration lasted approximately one second.
She seemed to find it acceptable.
Duncan came out last.
Five years old. From Fargo, North Dakota. The kind of kid who walks onto a stage in front of a full studio audience and immediately looks around like he is assessing the space, figuring out where to stand, making sure he knows where everything is.
Comfortable.
Not the performed comfort of a child who has been coached to seem comfortable.
The actual comfort of a child who is interested in everything and afraid of nothing and has not yet learned to be self-conscious about either of those qualities.
“Hey, Duncan,” Steve said. “How you doing, man?”
“Good.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live in Fargo.”
“Do you like school?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you like about school?”
A half-second pause. The genuine pause of someone actually consulting their preferences.
“Reading books,” Duncan said.
The video that brought Duncan to the show had been watched seven million times.
Seven million people watching a five-year-old attempt to answer one of the great questions of American childhood:
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
The question predates the internet. It predates most things that feel permanent. It was the premise of a television commercial in 1969 — a boy asking an owl, the owl saying let’s find out, the owl licking three times and then biting the pop, concluding: The world may never know.
The world, in this case, meant to find out.
Duncan had come to the experiment with equipment.
Specifically: a Tootsie Pop and a marker.
The plan was elegant in its simplicity. Every lick, he would make a mark. Count the marks. Arrive at a definitive answer that had eluded humanity for over fifty years.
He had gotten to 193.
That was the number.
Not 192. Not 194. Not a round number, not an estimate.
One hundred and ninety-three.
That was when something happened.
“You got to 193,” Steve said. “Then what happened?”
Duncan’s expression shifted slightly. The expression of a scientist describing a methodology error.
“I licked the marker,” he said. “Only one time.”
Steve Harvey stared at him.
“You licked the marker.”
“Yeah.”
“So you had the marker in this hand,” Steve demonstrated, “and the lollipop here, and you’d go lick the pop and then mark, and then lick and mark, and then —”
He mimed it: the lick, the turn of the hand, the mark.
“— and at some point you turned the wrong direction.”
Duncan nodded.
That was the data.
193 licks, one accidental marker lick, end of experiment.
The audience was laughing the way audiences laugh when something is funny and also completely honest.
Because that is what makes children funny. Not that they are trying to be. Not that they are performing comedy.
It is that they describe exactly what happened, without the filters adults apply — without the instinct to omit the embarrassing detail, to smooth the story, to present themselves in a better light.
Duncan did not say I got to 193 and then I had to stop. He said I licked the marker.
He included the marker.
He included it without hesitation, without shame, as a relevant piece of information about what occurred.
That is the whole thing.
That is the whole reason children are the way they are and the whole reason we love them for it.
They include the marker.
Steve Harvey told Duncan he was famous.
“You’re a pretty famous kid,” he said, “and you’re going to be more famous after today. Because all your friends are going to see you on TV.”
Duncan looked at the camera.
He seemed to be processing the concept of all his friends seeing him on TV. Filing it in the correct category. Deciding how he felt about it.
He seemed to find it acceptable.
“And,” Steve continued, leaning forward slightly with the expression of a man who is very much enjoying the delivery of good news, “you’re going to be really popular. Because see this Tootsie Roll right here?”
Duncan looked at the Tootsie Roll.
“I have some friends who work there. And Tootsie Roll Industries saw the video you made. And they have a surprise for you.”
A beat.
“You like surprises?”
“Yeah,” Duncan said.
And then they showed him.
Not a gift basket. Not a selection.
A ton of Tootsie Roll Pops.
Literally a ton. Or something that looked like one. Bags and bags and bags of them, stacked, more than one child could conceivably consume in a single childhood, enough that even if Duncan licked every single one and carefully marked a tally and never accidentally licked the marker even once — he would have data for years.
The audience went up again.
Duncan looked at the mountain of candy with the focused, clear-eyed expression of a person who has just received exactly what he needed and is already thinking about logistics.
Where would they all go?
Who would help carry them?
Would mom let him have one in the car?
Here is what those three stories had in common.
Dani and Dana with their “Call Jesus” sermon. Tony and Colette and little Cami. Duncan from Fargo with his marker and his 193 licks.
All of them went viral for the same underlying reason.
Honesty.
The specific, unguarded, unfiltered honesty that adults have trained themselves out of by the time they reach approximately sixteen years old.
The honesty that says: things aren’t working out? Call Jesus. That doesn’t say well, there are many coping strategies, it depends on your spiritual framework, you might want to consider therapy as well.
Just: call Jesus.
The honesty that says: I hope I see him. Not I’ll miss him, but I know we’ll see each other soon — the performed comfort, the managed feeling. Just: I hope I see him. The real thing.
The honesty that says: I licked the marker. Not the experiment was inconclusive due to an external variable. Just: I licked the marker.
Steve Harvey built a career on a version of that same honesty.
He is not a child. He does not have the same excuse. He has had decades of experience learning which truths are safe to say and which ones cost you something.
And he has chosen, over and over and over again, to say the ones that cost.
Most of those people are coming just to eat and drink. Cost him some goodwill, probably. Worth it.
Anybody can be a father. Takes a special man to be a daddy. Uncomfortable. True.
You can’t have a testimony without a test. Said to a man who had overdosed and lost everything. Could have landed wrong. Landed right, because it was said with love and recognition and the authority of someone who has also been through something.
What those kids had, Steve Harvey has.
The willingness to say the thing.
Clean and clear and without apology.
Papiere had been in the building the whole time.
That word — that invented, toddler-made, entirely-unofficial name — was the thread running through the second story the way a single detail will sometimes carry the whole weight of a thing.
It appeared first in the viral video. A grandfather. A toddler. A doorway.
See ya later, Papiere.
It appeared again on the stage, when Steve Harvey asked Cami what she called her granddad and she said it without hesitation. Papiere. And the studio laughed, and Tony explained it — that’s just what she calls me, started when she was learning to talk — and in that explanation was the whole story.
A man who had lost everything, including the years with his daughter, given a second chance that looked exactly like the first one.
Given a new name by someone too young to know the weight of what she was offering.
Given Papiere by a toddler who just needed something to call him. Something that was hers. Something she had made.
And it appears a third time here. At the end of the story. Because that name is not just a funny mispronunciation.
It is a second chance made audible.
It is the sound of a man getting back something he thought was gone.
Papiere.
Say it out loud.
It sounds like beginning.
Duncan went home to Fargo with more Tootsie Roll Pops than he could count.
Which was, if you think about it, exactly the right ending.
He had set out to answer a question. He had gotten to 193. He had licked the marker. The question remained, technically, unanswered.
But now he had enough material to try again.
And again.
As many times as it took.
Which is the other thing children know that adults forget.
You get to try again.
The experiment failing is not the end of the experiment.
You just pick up another pop, get a fresh marker, and start the count over.
One.
Two.
Three.
The studio audience went home that day.
They walked out into the afternoon light — Chicago light, that specific midwestern brightness that has weight to it, that feels like it is coming from a direction slightly different from what you expected — and they carried things with them.
Some of them carried the advice that made them laugh.
Don’t call Tyrone. Call Jesus.
Some of them carried the image of a man on the floor with a tiara at a tea party, his granddaughter across from him, both of them completely absorbed in the world they had built together.
Some of them carried the number.
One hundred and ninety-three licks.
And one accidental lick of a marker.
The number of times a five-year-old from Fargo tried before the process went sideways. The number that is not a final answer. The number that is a starting point.
Try again tomorrow. You’ve got enough pops.
Three kids walked onto a stage and reminded an audience of millions what they already knew.
That honesty is disarming. That forgiveness is possible. That the second chance looks like the first chance, sometimes, if you are paying attention.
That you can be on the floor with a tiara and still be a man.
That I hope I see him is one of the most important sentences in the English language.
That the answer to most of the world’s problems is simpler than we make it.
And that if all else fails —
If your job isn’t working out, if your school isn’t working out, if nothing is working out like anywhere —
You know who to call.