The little boy is smiling the perfect smile but I struggle to look at his face for more than few seconds.

It is too familiar.

His eyes are brown and my little boy’s eyes are blue.

His hair is brown and in the picture it is parted and feathered across his forehead.

My little boy’s hair is blond and it refuses, except when wet, to lie flat or to submit to any sort of styling.

But these differences are superficial.

These two little boys smile the same impish smile and it is easy, too easy, to imagine them jumping around together on a summer afternoon in that loose-limbed way peculiar to little boys, whose joints slide without friction and know nothing of soreness.

They would shout and laugh and if there was any grass around they would wind up with green stains on their knees.

I suspect the death of Dylan Scott Thomas during Saturday’s Miners Jubilee parade has affected almost everyone in Baker City.

Some of us were watching the parade. I was standing on the east side of Second Street at the corner of Valley Avenue, about one block south of where the terrible accident happened that took an innocent boy on his 7th birthday, of all days.

Many of us are parents.

And I’m certain that hundreds of other parents had a similar experience to mine when they saw that photograph that captured the essence of Dylan’s smile.

They saw in his bright eyes and smooth cheeks the faces of their own children, and they considered something that is all but inconceivable.

We all know that awful events happen, of course.

But this seems to me a sort of secret knowledge — the kind of dark thought which most often plagues us in the deep trench of night when we awaken from a nightmare and lie in that confusing purgatory between imagination and reality.

Yet in the aftermath of a tragedy even the daytime is different, I think.

My son Max, who is 6, has a new bicycle. He’s devoted much of the past week to mastering his new ride, a task which has involved the typical amount of wobbling and the occasional clumsy collision with curb or shrub.

As any parent will, I have, while jogging beside Max as he pedals, felt a twinge of fear whenever he turns the handlebars a bit too abruptly and seems destined to tumble into the streetside gravel.

But these mental images have seemed to me clearer than usual — more plausible.

I wouldn’t doubt but that other parents have felt the same misgiving this week, the same sense that life is more fragile than we would like to believe it is.

But whether we’re parents or not, it seems to me that each of us has something in common this week — we want to do something, anything, to show Dylan’s family that we care.

This can be both gratifying and frustrating.

Whether we offer prayers or condolences or leave flowers at Dylan’s memorial at Second and Court or write a check to help his family, we recognize that special sense of empathy that any person feels when trying to ease someone else’s suffering.

Yet simultaneously we understand how insignificant any gesture, however generous, seems when compared to the immensity of the Thomas family’s loss.

But of course we still post our prayers online and we buy flowers and we write checks.

We do these things because we care, and because we believe, should such a fate ever befall us, that our community would embrace us with the same warmth and love.

And because we have looked into those eyes.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.