I struggled to learn as a child. Certain things came easily. Others dragged on interminably until it seemed, for both my teachers and me, that I would never figure things out quite right. Like learning how to deal with the awkward combination of long limbs and gravity's foul temper, or figuring out how "See Jane Run" had anything to do with a person's daily routine. Why grammar was supposed to help make simple demands for food or comfort was a concept that went beyond my understanding. Then again though, so did fractions, and numbers, and science, and history, and most particularly...grownups. Grownups never made sense. Life was simple. No need for education, or ambition, or other kids--whose presence would only require me to share anyway. On top of that, they weren't much fun because their idea of imagination was to stand in their daddy's shoes and pretend they were already grown up and going to work everyday. See, I preferred to daydream my waking hours away, until it was time at last to return to sweet sleep and the realm of my evolving adventures.
I didn't learn how to read until I was 7, and even then my arm had to be twisted. Then I discovered a written gem called the Fairy Tale, and oh...but I was enraptured and forever after became the author and inhabitant of my own ethereal dreamscapes. I think it was round about that time of my life when my citizenship to reality became demoted to a part-time, and the whole of my imagination quit the earth for more lofty planes of fancy.
What a grand thing it would be to go back to those years, if only to reclaim the breadth and clarity of that child's creativity. That little kid is gone though...overwhelmed by a store of knowledge and experience that have crushed, forged, and hardened her into that abominable thing called an adult. Creativity is slower in coming now, because it must work its way through logic and reason. The Muse, which once delighted in the child's company, can barely be heard by the adult, and eventually tires of yelling and turns his back.
Many an author has weeped over the loss of those first years of simple dreams, careless abandon, fearless imagination and adventurous creativity. I have to wonder, though...why do they despair? Is death already cooling our lifeless bodies? Have our minds fallen silent, that we can't reclaim some of that old curiousity?
I say it's not too late. If it's all the same to those of fame and glory who have managed somehow to hang on to their childish adoration of the grand, impractical, and inspiring despite reality's best attempts to purge them, I would prefer not to be shat upon by inoppotune circumstances.
I say damn the odds. Anyone up for some whimsy?
