Pika

I have a lovely young niece who used to visit me for a month or so at a time in the summer, when she was a child.  May she forgive me--when she was an adult 8-year old person.  I lived in New Hampshire then, and the plane trip from her rather sophisticated home in Maryland to the outback of New England was an adventure that apparently matured her so completely and suddenly that she became worldly-wise overnight. Little girl that she was, and with a sense of purpose unusual for her age, as she boarded she noticed the empty seats in first class and gave herself an upgrade before the plane took off.  She had a lovely trip to Boston, she told me.  So grown up was she that when I took her hand to cross busy Bow Street in Portsmouth one afternoon, she yanked her hand free and with great poise told me that she was in "the teenage mode," and could cross the street by herself, thank you. 

She is 30 years old now, married, and has a child.  She dropped out of her PhD program a couple of years ago, and started a company in South Florida that does nearly $1 million in business a year now, and is growing. She still travels coach.

My nickname for her is Pika because she is so darn cute.