On fairy tales and fallen stars
the right book is sometimes the right answer
And now, as I read this charming little fable, it starts to dawn on me that maybe I need to approach things in my life a bit more elliptically these days.
Saturday morning and we’re back from a walk on the rail trail with the dog. I am sitting on the couch in the living room, a cool breeze is wafting through the open window.
“Will you make me a smoothie, too?” I say to my spouse Janyce, who has just entered the living room to sit across from me with her cup in her hands.
“I thought you were going to read me a fairy tale?” she says.
“I am,” I said. “Most of these are only a page or so long.”
Last night, we picked up a vanilla frosted birthday cake at Sugar Bakery in West Roxbury and drove to Janyce’s parents house. The five of us sat around the coffee table while the ceiling fan whirred and the late-day October sun cast an ochre tinge to the room. We sat around the table visiting and swapping stories while the two dogs mostly ignored each other. My sister-in-law Agni’s pug sat dutifully on her lap, and our dog Swirls lay spread out on the carpet with her snout under the table. My mother-in-law Maria Joyce had wrapped a few belated birthday gifts for Janyce and placed them at one end of the table with the cake dishes, forks, and napkins at the other.
“This one looks like a book,” said Janyce, unwrapping the tissue paper slowly while I cleared the used cake plates still stuck with gobs of uneaten frosting and carried them to the kitchen.
In the car on the drive back home we passed orange lit-up houses, and trees festooned with oversized glowing pumpkins on strings, and gray plastic gravestones studding the lawns, and more than one 14-foot realistic-looking skeleton looming over a front walkway and leaning over onto a railing.
“Wow, people really seem to be getting into Halloween more than ever this year,” I said, as we bounced along the back roads of the suburban towns that separate our two houses.
“I think mum might have missed the mark on this book,” said Janyce. “Usually she nails it.”
“What was the last one you read from her?” I said, reaching my hand back to pet the top of our dog’s head as the jeep jolted over a bump in the road.
“It was that book about the wolf,” she said. “You know, the one I gave to Jim to read. And then there was one about Indigenous women and their relationship to animals. And the one about the octopus. But fairy tales? I don’t know.”
I agreed with her that it was probably a miss. And I mentioned that we could always donate it to the free-standing library box in front of the yellow house down the street. I’m also not drawn to fantasy stories or fairy tales. Not usually. I don’t understand the appeal of the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings sagas, Harry Potter was never my thing. The Little Prince? The Alchemist? I don’t get those books at all.
Right now I’m reading the latest Richard Ford book. When I can’t sleep at night, I pull it from off of my nightstand and drag it under the covers with me, shining the light from my cellphone flashlight onto the open page. The character of Frank Bascombe, whose realistic life I have followed through all of Ford’s novels, is an old friend of mine. And when aging Frank says, in Ford’s latest novel Be Mine, “the problem with travel is eventually you arrive—with your old self lagging behind a few hours or nights or days, and finally catching up with all the same shit on his mind—at which point all you can do is travel on to someplace else.” I know in my bones exactly what he is talking about. Wherever you go, there you are.
I read the two pages that contain that sentence out loud to Janyce the other day while I was still in bed lazily flipping pages and she was buzzing around the bedroom getting ready to do things. I marveled at Ford’s specificity in describing Frank’s act of scattering the ashes of his long since deceased first wife— by himself, on an ordinary weekday, while he pondered the reality of happiness and what is meant by “giving life it’s full due,” and finally ending the section with the insightful two lines: “Why do we not do things? It is a far richer question than why we do.”
But something about this book of fairy tales, possibly its stark contrast to my love of realism, made me pause and I opened it up to thumb through it this morning.
Janyce takes a sip of her smoothie. “Sure, I will make you one in a minute,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, and I start reading aloud the story of “The Cat Who Looked Out To Sea.”
Certain lines ring out.
By night he watched the progress of moonlight on the water...
Every morning he would walk along the pebble beach and inspect the offerings left for him by the receding water: driftwood; shells and seaweed; shining stones and fallen stars…
When he lifted a paw, the sea rose…
He stood in silence on his rock, hardly daring to move, for fear of bringing disaster onto the world…
The moon smiled down, unseen and unsuspecting.
The other day I woke up with anxiety sticking in my chest like a half swallowed lozenge. I texted my friend in Maine. “Avery and Bethany are in lockdown. They go to that same bowling alley with their friends in Lewiston. Every single morning I wake up to shit like this. I’m sick of it.” My friend was feeling similar and we commiserated together over a few more texts.
And I was telling my health coach that I feel so stuck these days in a distinctly physical sense. I’m not sure all of my intellectual and rational decisions are making enough of a difference. And now, as I read this charming little fable, it starts to dawn on me that maybe I need to approach things in my life a bit more elliptically these days.
Maybe the fanciful helps to heal a frazzled nervous system and can even work to counter the latest horror in a string of ever-escalating bad news in the world. Maybe it’s simply more fun to read about a cat that takes itself so seriously that it believes it can cause the rise of the ocean by a simple swish of the tail. Maybe this is something Maria Joyce already knows.
And, I only like watching comedies!