Turtles Are Musical

Imagination.  Remember when you had it?  Remember when the bus that drove down your street was an enemy tank and your rifle was a stick that had blown off the oak tree in your backyard?  Remember how you hid behind the fence with your friends and shot at that “tank” with your “rifle” screaming at each other over the deafening noise of zooming bullets until the crippled tank drove on to the next bus stop?  No?  I’ll bet not one of you doesn’t remember lying in the grass with a friend watching clouds float above.   

• “That’s a fire-breathing dragon.  See?  Over there is the fire.  And it’s just about to burn up the knight on his horse.  Now the horse is rearing up and the knight is pointing his spear at the dragon.  The fire is making the spear so hot the knight's hand is burning but he doesn't care.  He’s making his horse rush even closer.”   
• “No.  That’s Barbie’s hair.  That’s not a dragon’s fire.  Ken picked her up in his convertible and her hair is blowing out behind her.  And now the car is going faster and faster.”

Do any of you still have that imagination?  I seem to have lost a lot of mine.  Maybe it’s because I just don’t feel like I have the time to call it up.  There are too many other “important” things demanding my time.  Vital things like cleaning the house, or doing laundry or sitting in a chair in a cubicle staring at a computer monitor eight hours a day.  Or even this – writing a blog post.  READING this blog post, however, could be not be considered vital; but if you have spare time to read trivial musings, I not only salute you, I envy you. 

Dean’s the crazy, weird, eccentric one with the “Seriously?  You want to do what with that?” imagination – not me.  I, of course, say that lovingly.  I do occasionally allow myself to imagine but it’s much more mundane.  It’s actually really more like I’m dreaming.  “I see them … Dean’s treasures ... 

 flying out of the house like they had little fairy wings.  There they go … off into the sunset … glittering and sparkling … happy … not here …”

But, if it weren’t for Dean’s imagination (and that ever-swelling supply of “treasures”) we would not have provided the neighbors with multiple topics for their dinner conversation – like Rudolph.

 I call him Rudolph anyway because after he’d been “skinned” and sanded and polished and varnished Dean gave him this nose. 

 It was initially bright red but it’s greyed over time as he’s aged, just like me.  I felt really bad for him recently when Dean felt he needed to accessorize him. Poor Rudolph.  I just hope it wasn’t as painful as a naval piercing.

I doubt Dean imagined the multiple colors his finger would turn ...

 

 

 

 

when he was pounding on some of his other treasures 

 

to create this garden hose holder.  I know he’s been imagining tangle-free loops of garden hose, lying peacefully on the rocks ever since he pounded those two metal objects in the ground.  I just hope, when he faces the tangled mess of hose after I’ve been the one to pull the hose back through the openings, he believes me when I tell him I “really did try hard”.

Nobody has commented about Rudolph or the hose holder (not to our face anyway) but one of our neighbors did finally walk over one day and ask Dean what he was doing with the stump in our front yard.  I guess over two years of watching intermittent work on a tree stump with no discernible progress was just too much for him.  He obviously had no imagination at all if he was unable to recognize a “fairy door.”

If Emerson, Myra and Pierce had been there they would have explained to him that Papa has been making a “fairy door” for a very, very, very long time.  We all call it the “fairy door” but it’s much more than a fairy door.  The door leads to a whole fairy house.  We don’t know how many fairies live there but Emerson discovered a secret fairy tunnel at the base of the fairy house.  Maybe the tunnel leads to the whole fairy city in the rocks that Myra discovered.  Maybe there are lots and lots of fairies! 

We all know the fairies must be very, very beautiful but nobody has seen one yet.

Once there were feathers in the fairy house and Emerson thought the fairies were using them for a bed.  Sometimes the fairies leave some of their own special treasures in the fairy house.  Nobody is sure if the fairies are storing their treasures in the fairy house or if they are bringing them as presents for others to take.  If only they could talk to fairy and ask them.

I wondered why the fairies would need stairs if they can fly everywhere. But Emerson told me sometimes they just like to walk  on the stairs, or sit on them. 

I think they need to talk to their fairy cleaning lady though.  Because they have been leaving fairy dust everywhere.

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Turtles Are Musical