room, cloud, any, fist, raven, rock, slide, speak, west, story, blend, circle
My story came full circle when I walked into that room.
When I was a kid, I believed animals could talk. I didn’t give it any thought that it may not be true until I lost my innocent intuition as an adult. It seemed I took a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree slide into radical realism.
Then, I became a father.
When my four-year-old son started insisting that birds could speak, I slammed my fist onto my desk, startling both of us. He ran off crying and I rationalized the incident as ‘good for him’ so he would recognize truth from fiction as soon as possible in such an unforgiving world. There was no blend of parental guidance and support for my child’s imagination that day. I was the boss!
He opted out of having me rock him to sleep that night and there was perceivable distance between us that I’d never before felt. A cloud of regret suddenly surrounded me.
My dad had been a Wild West, no nonsense guy, and I recognized immediately from my own past, the betrayal my son was feeling when I hadn’t listened to him.
Now, I walked into his room this morning, hoping desperately to mend our trust, and there on his open windowsill sat a large raven-like black and white bird.
“Daddy! This is my friend.”
I knelt beside my boy and said, “He’s beautiful Billy. Does he talk to you?”
Before Billy could answer, the bird (who turned out to be a pet magpie that was on the loose) said, “What’s up dummy?”.
Yep. I’ll be ‘eating crow’, for not believing in Billy, for years!
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