She stood up suddenly from the squat-on drill I had set up on a panel mat. I thought she was confused about what she was supposed to do, so I explained again, "Here, a squat-on is the way we get our feet up on the low bar to jump to the higher one." But she wasn't paying attention. Instead, she looked down at me (I was kneeling by the mini low bar) and asked abruptly, "Are you Jewish?"
I smiled.
"Nope!"
"Are you Catholic?"
"Noo ma'am."
Her little face was framed by staticky pieces of hair that had escaped from the confines of her hair elastic--a common affliction from crashing onto the mat at the handstand drill. The blatant confusion on her face because of my answer was the same expression that I remembered from my classmates when I was her age. "What are you?" they always wanted to know.

I always mumbled that I wasn't anything.

At my Christian day care--a program my parents picked because it was the closest to home-- I was made to bow my head and pray before eating the canned green beans and potato rolls they served. I was told to put my hands like this and say, "amen" when grace was finished.
I looked at this little gymnast in front of me. I am her teacher. The sudden reversal of dominance, of security, was startling. No one has asked me for years what religion I follow--and even longer in the past was it phrased, "What are you?" I realized just how much I've changed as a person...sometimes it seems like certain fears and insecurities have never gone away. But I was happy she asked; happy for the opportunity to expose her to a thought she'd never thought of before. I was about to respond with a politically correct statement about how there are a bunch of religions to practice, and how some people don't practice one at all--but her expression changed into understanding:

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "Are you African-American??"

And then I was laughing so hard that I thought tears were coming.