Today I was bringing my youngest to school in the morning, admiring the little drops of rain stuck in the grass and how they looked like jewels in the sun, when he piped up asking for a story about the "mystery sidewalk".
By way of explanation, the "mystery sidewalk" is a length of concrete sidewalk embedded in the front lawn of the elementary school. It comes from down the hill near the expansion trailers, comes up the hill through the grass, makes a single left turn and...stops. In the middle of the grass. My son and I have looked upon it dozens if not hundreds of times, wondering why it was there, who put it there, and why they stopped. Of course there are practical reasons for this, most likely. But what fun are those? One day I made up a story about the sidewalk being hit by moonlight just once a year, at midnight on a full moon night during a month with three full moons....and if you waited patiently a silver path would appear leading up into the stars, and you could follow it up into a land made of stars and stardust, and meet the aliens living there. Or something like that. I spun it off the top of my head to amuse my son.
He never has looked at that slab of concrete quite the same way since.
Today he asked me for another story about the sidewalk. So today the sidewalk had a trapdoor at its end that opened up and dropped you down down down, through the darkness into the center of the earth, where there was a gleaming city made all of crystal, with a spindly crystal track wound like cobwebs around the towers upon which a sparkling train runs under a subterranean sun.
While I was contemplating this in my mind's eye, fashioning crystal/silicon robots to walk spindly crystal dogs, he piped up with, "Tell me another one."
The next story detailed how the builders of the sidewalk had just put in the last slab when a huge and unusual gust of wind swept them up, up, up into the sky, among huge piled white clouds that tasted of icy vanilla. How the wind-people's castles weren't made in the usual way, with blocks of stone, but fashioned by hand from the yummy clouds, and that you could eat them, but you had to be careful not to eat through the floors or you'd fall through right back to earth.
"Tell me another one."
By this time we were almost to his class door, so I told him about how one day some kids were standing on the last slab and suddenly found themselves in a world of giant flowers and bugs! (This, because he's currently studying bugs in school.) The kids had been shrunk by the magic of the sidewalk into a land full of flower palaces and ladybug princesses, running on paths between grass blades in a half-lit world of gold and green.
My reward for spinning fantastical tales about a slab of plain concrete? Smiles that showed me he was thinking about and enjoying the stories, a hug and a kiss, and... when he got out of class this afternoon...
"Tell me another one?"
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