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| The Forest Floor Theory |
by
Odds Bodkin
"Will you tell me a bedtime story?"
There it is, the dreaded question. How's a kid to know that the real question is: "Now that you've worked yourself to exhaustion all day, dear parent--not to mention cooking me dinner and wrestling me into pajamas--do you mind reaching down into the depths of your being to find an inspired yarn? With me in it?"
When that question floats up from the pillow, what do you do? Do you launch off into the next installment of the fantasy saga you told, complete with cliff-hanger ending, just the night before? Starring your child by name, of course?
Or do you sigh inwardly, and mumble something about maybe tomorrow night.
Well, I'm a professional storyteller. Have been for fifteen years. I tell hundreds of stories. So when my children ask for a story at bedtime, if anyone should have one dancing on the tip of his silver tongue, it should be me, don't you think?
I try, some nights. Other evenings, like so many parents, I'm just too tired to pull anything from my struggling forebrain. All I want to do is to fall into bed myself.
Yet those tender storytelling moments, begging to be filled with the intimacy of imagination, are a lot like baby shoes, I've found. They don't fit for very long. One can't save them so your child can wear them later.
And so I make the effort. Does the cobbler's child go without shoes in my house? Perhaps a few nights. But on a few good ones I actually do manage to dream up original stories for my three boys, Jonathan, Gavin and Christopher. And sometimes those yarns do spin right up to the cliff's edge, then leave them hanging.
"What then?" they ask. "Sorry, guys. That's it. Good night." "Aw, c'mon Dad!" "Nope. That's it. What do you think will happen?" "That's not fair!" "Probably not," I reply. They all start to complain at once. "C'mon, Dad! "That's not enough!" "You can't leave us there! I smile. "Tough beans, and sweet dreams, boys."I kiss them again, then close the door. They'll hear more tomorrow night, if I'm not too tired. But what I've left them with tonight, I know, is part of a legacy. A legacy of Lobster Kings and giant desert limpets big as circus tents that walk the sands on tube feet. A world of pint-sized Paleolithic hunters, taming a baby Uintatherium who later grows up to save them from hungry Smilodons. A place of fast rivers, up which three wild boys ride telepathic dolphins, racing to save the last barrel-sized eggs of the vanishing Great Loons of Caltharr, far above the cataracts.
I'd like to think that with these stories, I am instilling in my sons their own heroic selves--the way they can be someday. Sure, for now they're just three squabbling little boys. But I want them to be noble. Does that sound foolish? Such an old fashioned word, noble.
Nevertheless, the Three Desert Princes in these tales, these characters who ride with my sons' names, are noble--no doubt about it. They practice harmlessness and wit. They are inventors. Observers. They ride like the wind when they must, and they fight if fights can't be avoided, but never do they start them. And they laugh alot.
I'm under no illusion that they'll remember all these tales. What's the point, you might then ask, of telling them, if they won't remember them?
Well, I have a theory about loving memories. It's called The Forest Floor Theory. It goes like this.Loving moments are like leaves. Gradually, over the course of childhood, they fall, one by one, from the parents. And like other leaves, they turn to soil on the forest floor. That soil is the love and tenderness from which new parents grow someday.
For me, bedtime stories are those leaves.
Consider all the characters in your child's life, other than you. All the empty superheroes. All the virtual villains who, although their escape crafts explode, never die. All the favorite fun characters marketed at kids so relentlessly that their little souls ache to own plastic figures of them.
If you think that those entities can come as close to your child's growing soul as you can, right there at the edge of the bed with a good story to tell, or read, I have to insist that you're wrong.
Oh, I know what you're thinking. How can I compete with this stuff? This is the way my child's world is.
Wrong again. This is the way your child's world is without you in it.
© 1997 Odds Bodkin