Of life and dreams

Noah painted this clay dinosaur last year. He was four. We were celebrating his friend's birthday at one of these pottery places where the kids choose a figurine and then decorate it with paint however they want to and get to keep it after it comes out of the kiln. Noah was unequivocally certain about his choice: he wanted the dinosaur.

This year, my beautiful boy wants to be a search and rescue hero. He piles the couch pillows high atop his old stuffed animals and fearlessly dives in, saving them all. He wants to live by the ocean, so he figures perhaps he'll be in the Coast Guard when he grows up.

The following short short is one of my favorites - it deals with dreams, our children, and really, our aging parents, too. I think the author captures the complexity of all of this - of life - in a beautifully touching way... Here's to hoping the dream is alive and well in all of us. Enjoy.

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Dinosaur
A short story by Bruce Holland Rogers

When he was very young, he waved his arms, snapped his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that dishes trembled in the china cabinet. "Oh, for goodness' sake," his mother said. "You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!" Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. "Seriously," his father said to him after school one day, "what do you want to be?" A fireman, maybe. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero.

But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was good with numbers. Perhaps he'd like to be a math teacher? Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he became a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted it, because it made him feel, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse: a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, to take his pill, to turn his hearing aid on. Every day it seemed he forgot more things, important things, like where his children lived and which of them were married or divorced.

Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling its familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water's edge.

Many, many thanks to Bruce Holland Rogers for kindly giving me permission to publish this story here. To read more of his fantastic work, click here.(sunset image: vaeltaja via flicker)