They say we adults need to be more like children. I disagree, we are children. I believe we are as emotional as any child. We throw tantrums when we don’t get our way. We war against our enemies, because we wish to take their oil fields, their toys. Like children.
Frank McGee lives down the street from me. He lives with two daughters, Emile and Esmeralda, twins with curly golden hair. Frank is a construction worker. He divorced his wife for adultery. She claims not to have begun crack until after he’d moved out. Frank suspects otherwise. He tells me all the time. I can tell he still misses the good times they’d had and shared. She still lives in him. He looks up from yard work. The wet snow sputters down thick from the cold, winter skies. He looks as each car passes, an intensity in his eyes I can see as I approach with my two children. Frank waits for his ex-wife. Although he denies it, actions do not lie. We both know it. Neither one of us will bring it up.
The slow car tracks through the snow, slows down as my two children cling to my legs as we walk. Tony and Tucker are young enough to enjoy the snow and still be a little leery about too much distance from me. The snow has made the world a wonderland and their wide eyes and rosy smiles mirror the magic for me. I cannot feel the magic, for I am an adult. Adults do not feel the magic children feel. Such things belong in faerie tales. Yet some adults still believe in faerie tales such as Frank.
Tony and Tucker join Esmeralda and Emile and the snowmen. The girls already have three half-formed snow-creatures started, and the boys crack jokes about zombie-snowmen.
“Where do they get this stuff?” Frank asks as he shovels snow from the sidewalk from the front porch to the street. “Do they watch horror movies?”
“They’re boys, Frank,” I shrug. He doesn’t see me shrug since I wear my heavy winter coat. “They’re just boys. I don’t let them watch anything inappropriate.”
Frank grunts but ignores me as another car passes by. He gives it the same intense scrutiny I’ve come to expect. He sighs when he realizes it’s nobody he knows. When he realizes it’s not her.
“She’s never coming back,” I say.
“Who’s not coming back?” he asks.
I hesitate then say, “My wife.”
My wife died four years ago. She’d been drunk in her car after a party. Left the boys and me for another place in the skies, a place called Heaven. At least this is what I tell my boys. She left me in hell. Only my boys take the pain away with their playful rosy smiles, melts even my cold heart.
“Let’s get a hat!” Tucker exclaims. He’s five years old and believes in magic, Santa Clause and snowmen. He’s cute as he adds, “But it has to be a magic hat!”
Esmeralda is six years old. She laughs and exclaims, “Snowmen are ee-maji-nary...like nightmares!” She dodges the snowballs Tony lobs.
“Nightmares?” Tony asks with a scoop of snow in his mitten. “What do snowmen and nightmares have to do with each other? One is scary and one’s fun!”
“They both exist up here in our minds,” Esmeralda says with derision and taps her winter cap with her gloved finger. “Daddy says we give them power to exist through our ee-maji-nay-shun!”
“Imagination!” Frank corrects her.
“Imagination,” she replies.
Tony and Tucker both whisper the word: imagination. The wind takes the power of their whispers away. They are soundless, but I read their lips...I know my sons.
Imagination!
“Through the eyes of children!” I say to Frank.
I help Frank shovel the rest of the sidewalk. The driveway is already clear. Afterwards we go inside to enjoy hot chocolate and watch our children in the front yard through a large picture window. It is warm inside and a little smoky from the fireplace. Frank stokes the fire which makes embers wild dance. I wonder why he can’t sit down and relax. When a car drives by I see my friend stick his face against the glass of the large picture window, and I realize he can never relax. He still waits for his ex-wife to come back, like the children wait for the snowmen to come to life. Emile found black hats which look like the traditional hat Frosty the Snowman wore, kind of a short top hat. Because the hats look like Frosty’s hat the children have decided they are, indeed, magic. They dance around the five snowmen they’ve built and sing Frosty the Snowman. They remind me of little savages who dance around a tropical campfire in snow suits, and I am glad they are outside with all of their energy and Frank and I are inside with our solitude. I’m amazed how lack of sound can calm an adult.
I hear a familiar motor but no not move until I see the mail truck. I put my coat on and run outside. By the time I get to the street the mail truck is already at my house, the mailman puts precious mail inside my snow-covered mailbox. It could be there, I think as I run. There could be a miracle in the mailbox today. Please, God! Let it be there!”
As I run toward my house I watch the mail truck drive further away like my hopes and dreams. And I realize we all see through the eyes of children. We all believe in magic hats rabbits jump out of, magic hats magicians use, magic hats cause snowmen to come to life.
Last week Tucker cried because Tony had convinced him the snowmen they’d built in our yard had come to life. Through the eyes of a child inanimate snow had come to life, and I had to calm down and show him the snowman they’d built stood as lifeless as a rock or stone. And yet now I wonder if rocks are lifeless as I open up my mailbox. So many rejection slips! So many times publishers have sent my stories back because they were too dark, too macabre or too depressing. Because my intoxicated wife died, eaten alive by cancer and had opted to kill herself by driving her car headlong into a building. Because it’s all I can write about. The cancer still lives through me somehow, eats away at my happiness, takes joy away from my job in the retail business, and makes me write about it.
A few years ago, I was in the Bank One Tower in downtown Indianapolis with my 8 year old son.
I worked in the building and had to stop by to drop something off. When the elevator door closed,
my son promptly sat down on the floor. I immediately told him to stand up and said that you can't
sit down in an elevator. He looked at me and said "Why not?" I had visions of suit-clad executives
frowning upon someone sitting down but could not think of an actual valid reason to tell him. So I
sat down with him and still occasionally sit down in an elevator. It's amazing what you can learn
from your children.
