real. I know, no matter how hard I wish on any star to
be rescued, a silly boy will not show up at my window
and ask me to tell him stories. No boy has ever asked
me to tell him stories. Or girl, for that matter.
I write them all the time, though, in my bright Lisa
Frank notebook. Years later, my pencil scribbles with
misspelled words will all be there. Stories smudged
into the pages with titles like, “Lost in Blarney
Castle,” “Tom the Turkey Hates Thanksgiving,” or
“When I am a Mom” (“I will get my friends and we
will leave the kids with all the men and have a
hayday”) or “How the Leaves Change Color.” I write
poems, too, lots of poems. Poems with dark edges and
shadows. With sadness and water and tears and the
sea. No one reads those either.
So we play, in that cluster of pine trees, the cheering
sounds a distant rumble. An occasional crack of the bat
against the leather of the ball. I play Tink, unable to talk,
so I gesture with my hands for her to follow me and we
race around the trees, pine needles crunching beneath
our feet. We climb the low-hanging branches and jump
off, take those few stolen seconds of groundlessness to
pretend to fly. And in the sweet moments we are on the
grass, limbs hanging over one another, laughing. For a
moment, being a kid is not so bad.
That same year, our class is assigned Peter Pan for the
annual Spring Sing. My brother's class gets Aladdin.