Castles in the Clouds

A birthday with the dawn.

My son will be five when next he opens his eyes. I wonder what dreams flutter behind little lids gossamer thin.

Sometimes he remembers enough to tell me all about dinosaurs and aliens and big bugs and the “baddies” who tasted his steel in that place far from here. His stories grow more incredible all the time. Dispatches from the land of sleep and enchantment, where the world is a canvas brushed by his imagination, like the Goab in The Neverending Story, a desert whose dunes are shaded with every color conceivable and guarded by Grograman, a magical lion who dies every night and lives each morning again. What did Michael Ende mean by this? I’m not too sure. Maybe Grograman represents the waking reason that is subdued and altered when we seal it up and shove off for fanciful shores.

We look at the constellations before bed some nights. I tell him that men have long used their light to find a way home, and he doesn’t quite understand how someone might lose their way. I say that it’s easier than it seems but that those lights will always be there. So will his mother and father. He asked a question about dying the other day, and I told him that the people you love never really leave you. They’re always there, like the stars above.

He is growing up in such a strange world. Stranger than the one I knew. Darker. More uncertain. Splitting at the seams. He has no idea, and I want to keep it that way a while longer. Castles in the clouds. That is where I want him to be a while longer. My wife picked out a nice bicycle for his birthday. I hope that together we can teach him to ride it fast and steady. Enough to outrun the devil.