Someday I'll Wish Upon a Star...

When I was a kid I loved it. I loved the song. I loved the movie. I loved Professor Marvel and the art of black and white mixed with color, and the harsh midwest reality mixed with unreal fantasy. I loved the message and I loved the messenger. I loved it all. The Wizard of Oz was a bit of an escape for me...I think every kid has one place they like to go. For me it was Oz when I was small, and Tom Sawyer's Hannibal, Mo when I grew older. Then it became Rocky Beach, California and the Titus' Scrapyard. When I grew much older the fiction gave way to fact, and the underground railroad, whose secrets emptied out in part a short bike ride from my house offered plenty of imagination and mystery for a growing boy. I was every bit a day dreamer. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to the people who know me.

When I was in the sixth grade my homeroom teacher, Mr. Wilmott, scribbled in the comments of my mid-term report, "if Brian could focus as much of his attention and energies into his math and science as he does Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn he'd be an A student," and looking back my mother never had such a telling observation laid right in her hands. I would rarely focus as energetically again, at least, not on what other people told me mattered.

Now as a middle aged man I've stumbled upon Harry Potter, after decades of airplanes and empty coasts and starry deserts and far flung cobblestone streets...enough free time filled with wonder to fill Santa's sack four times over and yet, still not enough. I guess I'm still something of a day dreamer. I hope someday a teacher finds it necessary to scribble something similar on Zo or Maggie's report card. I think it was important. It illuminated imagination and hope and inspiration and a dozen other things that are necessary to manage this rapidly revolving world. I always knew that someday I'd wake up where the clouds were far behind me, and that was important...a life saver. When things got really tough I dreamed of far away places and whether it was Phileas Fogg or Phineas Bogg, I spent a good deal of my time wondering, "why oh why can't I?" The answer, in the end, was why not?

Jill Eisenstadt once wrote, in From Rockaway that, "her legs swing complete afternoons away." That was me, and it's a beautiful idea. A child so engrossed in escape and wonderment that time might actually stand still. Alexander Dumas also wrote in, The Three Musketeers, that "Nothing makes time pass or shortens the way like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance." That's a pretty beautiful idea that a young boy can take no meaning from time...not if they can imagine endless eons without a watch...not if the chance to hurtle through time and space is as simple and accessible as closing their eyes.

The dreams that you dare to dream really do come true, if you dare to dream them. Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up...well, right here.