One day, my little cousin made me cry. Okay, fine, she’s not that little anymore. She’s currently having her quarter-life crisis (*waves at Bulit*). Don’t worry. We all go through it – why did you think I went to grad school?
Anyways, when Bulit was younger, she used to make me tell the story of Cupid and Psyche over and over again before going to sleep. As much as I adore Greek mythology, there were times that I didn’t want to give in to her. I had other concerns: I was adjusting to being away from home for the first time, I was failing Math 18 (yes, OMG, can you imagine?), I was tripping and falling all over campus (excuse me while I slap Roomie for laughing at me) and the love of my life was ignoring me (life was SO simple then). And here was this persistent eight-year-old saying “Please Ate, one more time, before I sleep.” Bulit, you know how your name rhymes with kulit, right?
So while I was away, Bulit grew up into a young writer, even though in many ways, she is still the kid who introduced me to Anne of Green Gables (Gilbert Blythe, SIGH…) and Narnia. But I had forgotten about all those nights we stayed up, wrapped in our blankets, talking about Psyche’s incompetence with the hot wax (seriously, who could be that careless? We would never drop anything that could potentially injure what we imagined to be Cupid’s six-pack) until I came across this from Bulit’s blog.
How ashamed I was that many nights I said, I can’t, I’m so busy. How guilty I felt that something I thought to be so trivial and tedious to me would be so important to her. How proud I was that something I had passed on to her had opened up her imagination and her creativity, and has forever colored her path in life.
Like Bulit, I had a favorite bedtime story. It, too, involved the stupidity of molten wax. My father, who celebrates his birthday today, is probably the consummate bedtime storyteller (no offense to my mother, who in fairness trumps my dad in the realms of algebra and accounting). Between the both of them, my parents had probably read every book that was worth reading, and watched every movie that was worth watching. Part of the genius of my dad’s storytelling was that he did not limit himself to the traditional fairy tales that adults tell their children. My father told us stories about Moses and the Amalekites (coincidentally, one of today’s readings at Mass), Jason and the Golden Fleece, Orion the hunter, Mangao, Maria Cacao and Mount Lantoy, the story behind Tie a Yellow Ribbon (I think Dad just wanted to sing it at the end of the tale) and so many other stories that are probably buried under all the other learning I have accumulated in my brain.
My favorite, as I said, involved a bit of molten wax. Icarus escaped out of a prison tower using a pair of manufactured wings made of feathers held together by, you guessed it, candle wax. Before the flight, Icarus’ father, who had built the wings, warned him not to fly too close to the sun. But Icarus, so overwhelmed by the freedom, so drunk with his power (after all, no other person could FLY), forgot his father’s advice and flew towards the hot Sun-Chariot, lost his wings, and fell into the sea that bears his name.
But oh, how those stories made me devour even more stories! When I was nine, I finished Bulfinch’s mythology, and, to my parents’ dismay, the Thorn Birds. When I was in sixth grade, I memorized Brutus’ speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, not even realizing at that time who William Shakespeare was. The Bible was also fair game, and I had probably read most of the Old Testament before graduating from elementary school.
Today, I am mostly occupied with reading material on hat matrices and survival functions and structural breaks and all sorts of wonderful things that make one want to bang her head on the wooden table. But even these have stories behind them. Even these had that magic “aha!” moment, driven by imagination and creativity. Even these were results of somebody’s attempts to fly towards the sun. And sometimes I touch that feeling of discovery and freedom that Icarus felt as he was flying over the Mediterranean Sea.
And yes, I guess there is a point to this long-winded, rambling, all-over-the place discourse. The art of storytelling has been confined to television programs and books that aim to reach the “average” child. There is no mystery, there is no heroism, there is NO FLYING! We tell our children about ordinary things or ordinary people. Things that they already see everyday. How can they widen their imagination? How can they dream of things that are bigger than they are? How can they FLY?
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