It's Just a Carp * September 28, 2007

Dear Keepers of the Dreamers,

    Going back to school at forty-eight means that I have a lot of homework to do, and I worry that all the other kids will make fun of my mom jeans. 

    Dr. Brown, my Mythology teacher, related a wonderful story illustrating the ability of children to see the magical and mystical in just about everything from the moon in the sky, to the wind in the trees, to the dog relieving itself in the yard.  Children are easily awestruck, if not discriminating. 

    Seeing magic everywhere is indeed a wonderful aspect of childhood which we adults delight in stomping into rubble every chance we get.

    At her annual garage sale, Dr. Brown described her yard filled with the bits and pieces that make up the average American yard sale.  There were tables filled with old books, games, and puzzles.  Bedspreads thrown across the lawn were covered with a jumble of odds and ends adorned with those sticker dots from Wal-Mart.  The day had been wearing on when Dr. Brown noticed a little girl and her father.  The father had given his daughter a dollar to spend on anything she wanted.  She picked through the junk with care (sizing up this, examining that) and then she saw it.  She saw something so wonderful, so magically wonderful, that she could not believe it was priced at only fifty-cents.

    “Dad, look at that!”  She pointed and grabbed his hand. I suspect her eyes sparkled. “And it’s only fifty-cents.  I want that.” 

    His eyes followed her pointing finger to a frosted globe on the ground.

    “Oh  dad, can you believe it?  I can’t believe we found it.  And it’s only fifty-cents.  Let’s buy it.”  

    Puzzled by her rapture he asked, “But why do you want to spend fifty cents on that thing?”

    “Dad, don’t you see it?”  She whispered.   “It’s a crystal ball.”

    He walked over, picked up the glorious crystal ball, turned it over and said, “But honey, we have one just like it—over the light bulb—in the bathroom.”

    Dr. Brown’s story put me in mind of another child—a little boy—who after wrestling and fighting for a fair amount of time reeled in a glorious fish out of his backyard pond.  It was the biggest fish the little boy had ever caught.  It was a fish that required two hands to hold and a photograph for the scrapbook.  He ran home with his glorious, big fish yelling, “Mom, mom come see the fish that I caught.” 

    His mother ran for her camera and called to the boy’s father, “Come and see the whopper that our good boy just caught.”

    Bare feet caked in mud, boney knees knocking together,  tee-shirt soaked with the sweat of battle the little boy stood on the back stoop holding up his wonder fish.

    His father, a good man who knew a bit about fish, looked the wonder fish up and down and said, “But son, it’s just a carp.”


                    Be it this week resolved by Ya-Ya Zern (grandmother to Zoe, Conner, and now Emma) that I will allow myself to remember what it was like to believe in crystal balls and magical fish and animals that can tell and keep secrets.  And that before I am tempted to stomp on anyone’s magic I will, instead, get down on my arthritic old knees and look, really look at the fairies living under the hay behind the horses’ watering trough in our barn. 

    I hope you have a magical week.

Linda (Dream Weaver) Zern 

  

  

Powered by CityMax.com