I heard once that what makes children special isn’t what they don’t know and all the things they aren’t aware of, but the innocent and remarkable ways they interpret everything they see, hear and feel as they experience the world around them. It makes sense. If ignorance equaled cuteness, we would love and adore blondes instead of merely wanting to sleep with them. Likewise, the fact that I don’t know how to ice skate doesn’t make me more endearing; it only makes me not gay.
When I was very little, the first time I saw the crescent moon in the sky, I naturally assumed that it was a floating, bitten-off thumbnail of a giant. I went on believing that for a long time. I remember thinking that the fact that it changed shape and became more circular as the month went on certainly seemed like a strange thing for a giant fingernail in the sky to do, but I just chalked it up to be one of those things a grown up could explain but that I wouldn’t really understand anyway, so I might as well wait until I’m older. There were lots of things like that when I was little.
I’ve long ago gotten over the pride I once felt at learning that the moon is in fact just a big rock floating in space, and furthermore that we’d already landed on it and took a little stroll a few years before I was born. I also regret learning the truth that trolls don’t live under bridges. I mean, not that I want a troll under every bridge or anything. That would really suck for all those people in Oakland that have to commute to San Francisco every day, having to deal with some goblin jumping in front of their cars at any given moment. But I do think the occasional troll living under a small wooden backcountry bridge here and there would kind of perk things up a little, especially if it’s the bridge over the river on the way to grandmother’s house. That would make me feel that amazing things exist in the world. The closest thing to trolls in the real world are the homeless people that I walk by every day at lunchtime, but they only make me feel sad. Although a lot of them probably really do live under bridges.
Why is Paris Hilton the closest thing we have to a princess? Why does our president have to make fairy-tale villains look harmless in comparison? How did pharmaceutical companies take the idea of magic beans and turn it into something so sinister and abused? Why does my personal dragon that I have to slay before I can have my happy ending have to involve resolving debt, and constantly fixing car problems, and never feeling totally at ease with anyone at all really, and just generally never knowing if I’m winning or losing, or even if I’m really in the fight in the first place?
I guess I don’t want to know less than I do. I just wish I could perceive it all in some special way again. Even if I were dead wrong about everything, it would make some beautiful kind of sense, if only to me.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
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