The Little Boy

This is a story about a little boy.  Like all children, he was magic.  The stars spoke to him through his window.  His feelings were color.  His father was a bright, intensive yellow, like the sun.  His home was a cool blue.  Every time he left his room the world was new.

There was a giant weeping willow tree in the large yard of the rich people who lived at the corner of his street.  Every day as the little boy passed the tree on his way to school or to the schoolyard to play, he stopped for a moment beneath its drooping branches which almost touched the ground.  Going under, he was the son of his parents.  He emerged with new attributes and eyes, as a fearless warrior or a dreamer within a dream.


One day, as he was flying from the very top of the cherry tree behind his house, he miscalculated and drove his head into the ground.  His white shirt became red with anger and fear.  Later, at the hospital, he lay under a gentle, cloud-like cloth illuminated from above.  A voice kept repeating, ‘you’ll feel a little tug’, as he felt a little tug on his forehead.  He still touches the scar that, once upon a time, was hidden under his hairline.

As the years passed, he began to lose touch with the magic.  Sports, girls, competition, cars, college, career challenges, family, the trials of child rearing, mortgages, disappointment, death, all created a world  of things that the little boy, now a man, called reality.

But a strange thing happened during a very low period in the man’s life.  He found and rummaged through a little blue box that contained artifacts from his life, the kinds of things that archeologists of the future would find fascinating.  There were homemade whistles, tiny stones preserved in glassine envelopes, a piece of a broken automobile wheel, a silver baby rattle deformed by baby teeth and a picture of the little boy taken in one of those amusement park machines.

That picture, like the touchstone of his temple scar, brought back memories of when the world was not made up only of things but was a place of wonder, where things and feelings and imagination and actions and joys and hurts and relationships all lived together and created a unity that transcended the mechanical world.

The picture of the little boy and the scar of a miscalculated flight continue to remind the man that, as Wordsworth says, the world is too much with us and that we tend to waste our powers getting and spending.  Now, as he experiences the world from the vantage point of his years, he tries to see its sounds, hear its feelings and remember that he and everyone he meets is magic.