Last week on my walk I saw a little princess.

She was eight or nine, dressed in a sparkling baby-blue dress that caught the morning sunlight as she rounded the corner. The fabric, silk or rayon, shimmered on her shoulders and on her chest, where it parted in cascading pleats to her knees, each trimmed in ribbon of velvet, of a hue of lighter blue.

As we approached each other from afar, a block or so away — she was walking with her father, a tall young man with cropped graying hair and olive skin — I studied her, smiling, unsure of what she seemed to be wearing on this normal weekday morning in the middle of the Coronavirus epidemic but increasingly hopeful that I was seeing right.

And in fact at every step I felt more and more sure that, indeed, the little girl with soft-brown shoulder-length hair was wearing a little princess dress, with white tennis shoes, and she was immensely — visibly — buoyed by the specialness of her outfit, which, be definition, made her special.

As I walked toward them I remembered a pink princess costume I once had —the only one I have ever had, in fact. My parents bought it for me in Cremona, for our first Carnevale there in our new city.  Or maybe it was the second; I had been invited to a party at the house of a classmate of mine, Ida, and the occasion had caused expense.

I don’t remember where we bought the costume; I think it had been an expedient choice — perhaps the least expensive, the one on sale, left over on the rack. I don’t know. I just remember that I went to the party at Ida’s ritzy bourgeois apartment in Cremona with a dozen or so little girls all dressed in expensive costumes — Arlecchino, Pierrot, la Fata Turchina — that had been seemingly planned and tailored and coveted for days or weeks, with much excitement and perhaps a little competition, and the little simple pale pink dress made me feel like I was more like Cinderella than a princess.

I have in my memory a picture of me in my princess dress with the other little girls, and my little pale face is unsmiling and serious, almost beaming a wish that I could be elsewhere. I have never quite understood what it was — and I don’t remember the truth of it. Maybe I just felt out of place. Maybe I was still digesting this move that my memory has insisted in smoothing out for me and making seamless. Maybe it had nothing to do with the dress; maybe it was just that life did not, at that point, feel seamless after all.

I have always wished I could recast the memory of my princess dress and the day I wore it, or how I lived it. How the feeling of being a princess, in the only princess dress I have ever worn, eluded me. How I wished I could get it back. It was a beautiful dress, and I wish I had felt it on me.

So, when we came face to face, a few feet away from each other across the pavement, me and the little princess and her father, I smiled and told her how beautiful her dress was and how happy she seemed to be wearing it. Her little oval pale face broke out in a huge grin and she told me that she has many princess costumes, one of almost each color. She widened her arms and twirled in the street and showed off her dress, cognizant and bemused and utterly thrilled by the specialty of it all.

While the little princess skipped off ahead, her father explained that she wears a princess costume every day, almost all the time. She has dozens, and that is all she cares to wear — no matter where, no matter when.

“I wondered whether it was a good idea to let her,” her father explained, hands deep in his khaki shorts’ pockets, an accepting, relaxed smile peaking through, “but I decided that if it makes her happy, why not?”

“I love it,” I said to him, smiling, tears gathering. “Good for you. And for her.”

Seeing the little princess filled me with childlike joy. I would have hugged her father for letting her indulge in the extraordinariness of childhood and dream and make-believe, knowing that it won’t be long before it’s morphed or jaundiced or simply wiped away into the ordinariness of growing up. Of “stopping being special.”

And standing there beside her, I slipped on her costume — for just a second — and made the aura of her enchantment be mine.

When we parted, with my memories pulling me back semi-sweet and perplexing, I turned back to look at her. I saw her running, her shimmering baby-blue dress trailing behind above her sneakers, dancing on the sunny pavement, her happiness at being a princess bursting forth, tangible and unambiguous.

Now, every morning on my walk I hope to run into her. And I hope to wear her princess costume just once more.