Wonder Stories

Today, I am thinking about things that do damage and things that do not. About stories that are more like mycelium roots, about what kinds of relationships we have, and about the window that is still open in this room, while others throughout the house have been shut.

I was reading Jen Campbell's "The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night" when I put the book down for a moment and noticed that it's published by Two Roads press and then, whether they intended this or not, I was thinking about the Frost poem and about my own walk in the arboretum this afternoon, in the only section of the woods that are open after the hurricane. I started thinking about my spouse's comment that I needed to be mindful of little six- and seven-year-olds as I enumerated the flaws I'd found with the latest Star Wars movie and how I should be aware that this was their first experience of the movie on the big screen. That I shouldn't take a chance on ruining their childhood experience of a movie that both of us had loved as children. Even if it isn't the same movie. Even if we don't know any six- or seven-year-olds.

Am I still that kid in the theater? The one who dreamed about Luke Skywalker showing up and walking in person at the very front of the movie theater, directly in front of the screen, just as stunned by his movie as we were? Is that person the one who was disappointed by the latest movie? The one who is enchanted by "The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night"? Is that person still kept tenuously inside me, like an astronaut in space, tangled up in the roots of all the wonder stories that I've read or seen?

It feels as if more than the breeze is seeping through the window, as if evening itself wanted to pour into the room and even out the light and dark, bleed the screen a little dimmer, so that I can pay attention to a distant neighbor's hammering, the beat of my own heart as I sit cross-legged in this chair, the burble of barks that trace arrivals and awarenesses among the houses and yards. That breeze promises a little extra buoyancy to the person tangled in those roots, hints at stories that are just about to bud open in the night.

I certainly don't want to damage the growth of any stray senses of wonder around me. As much I resent his words--sometimes bad stories have to be untangled verbally--, I'll have to hang them in the same place as those other writer 'rules' of surreal applicability, in the oil and water mixtures of 'should' and 'art' that become stories.