Naomi, age seven
Remember when you were five or six and you had a friend over and you said something like, “Let’s imagine that we’re in a hot air balloon and we’re flying over India and we’re on our way to meet an elephant.” And then you climbed up into your living room wing-back chair and peered out over your carpet, squinting as though you were looking down a really long way, and somehow, because your friend was doing it too, it felt real? Even though you knew you were in your living room, you also were in a hot air balloon, too.
Over Thanksgiving, I got to play “Let’s Imagine” with my niece. We rode in a magic elevator to places all over the world to fight the evil Dr. Subtraction, who was, of course, stealing valuables. There’s something magical about belief like that, when a family room turns into an ocean, or you have to tiptoe across the front room because a bear is sleeping just around the corner.
My best writing days are those days when I slip into my office early in the morning before the sun rises, and in the quiet, that little girl I used to be waits for me. She crooks her finger at me and whispers, “Let’s imagine…” and even though my fingers are flying across keys in my office, because she’s there with me, I’m also snowshoeing past bear dens in the Michigan woods, or catching the wind on a stormy northern california beach.
There’s plenty of time to be grown up and reasonable and realistic. Perhaps we should try, more often, to remember the way we used to be.
