About once a week, my 8-year-old niece FaceTimes me. She usually appears in an imaginative outfit which she exhibits proudly. And she makes an entrance every time, pouncing onto the screen as if to say, “Ta da! Check me out!” Last night after she made her entrance, she said, “do I look like sparkly Hungarian horntail?” I had to do a quick google search while her dad assured her she was the spitting image.
The last few times she has called, we have made our way through various stuffies and their names while she corrects me on my animal knowledge. At 8, she knows a lot about so many things. It makes me wonder what I knew at that age. At one point in the conversation, she took me downstairs to show me the “people plants” she had created with her Legos. Like the stiff Lego man with a carrot on his head. And the 1/2-bodied human (she couldn’t find a lower torso) topped with a flower.
Lately, though, she has been reading me her books. And I do mean HER books. She writes and illustrates them. And they are good! They usually involve an unexpected friendship between animals, have a problem to be solved, and end up happily. Her illustrating is advanced, her imagination fully engaged. What a treasure.
I am not sure why she has claimed me as one of her readers, but I suppose she feels my happiness at being called. I think that it is a lot for just two parents to engage. She can be quite urgent about the need for engagement and I feel so lucky to be able to be in her life in this way. I wonder, if my imagination hadn’t been inhibited so much, how my creative life would have evolved with more vigor. I hope the education system allows for more of that now. In the 70’s, it was mostly about conformity and control. I remember hating art class because I couldn’t color between the lines as well as Rhonda and Ellen could. Literally: color between the lines. Seems pretty crazy now. I doubt it was all self-imposed.
The use of story has been a current through my life. I wrote stories as a kid, some of them through puberty were a bit, shall we say, racy. When my mom found them, she was horrified. But not as horrified as I was. Once we had established that they weren’t true and had destroyed all evidence in the burning barrell, it was a bit of a joke. She told me I could probably get a scholarship and write under a pseudonym. Oh my word. Growing up is hard. And there are few places to engage one’s imagination.
Except music. I pretty much transitioned to that kind of story by high school. Thank God for that. It has saved my life a few times.
It isn’t the things that happen to us that are our stories. They are events, occurrences, happenings. It is what we tell ourselves about the things that happen that make our lives and create our stories. Not to mention our well-being. We create our stories. Right now, my niece is creating her stories, quite literally. The day she finds out there are no unicorns will be a hard day in that household. As it should be. The world might be better with rainbow unicorns in it. However, I imagine she will frame it for herself in a way that preserves her dignity and the joy of imagination. There is far too little joy and imagination in the lives of most of adults.
I think I might go look for a sparkly Hungarian horntail outfit.
poems, prayers, and ponderings 
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