Last weekend Lindsay, Becca, Roz, myself, and the majority of the Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers (HAJET) Prefectural Council headed to President Simon Daly’s place in Engaru for our first, full, officially meeting. The Important Business Bits of the weekend went far better than I could have ever expected (not that I was expecting them to go particularly badly or anything). The Natural Beauty Bits of the weekend are better shown below (coming soon) than described here. The Childlike Wonder Bits of the weekend require a description, though, as the fact that one of Simon’s kiwi-born children only knows how to answer the question “how old are you?” with “Ni-sai!” is only the tip of the uniquely childminded iceberg.
While the Daly Children were up, we served as canvasses and mirrors for their imaginations: Grumpy Bears when we shut the doors of our side room to keep out their early risings; monsters and extraterrestrial ninjas constructing edible moons out of the intergalactic cheese of cosmic cows. We arranged names for ourselves from random strings of guttural noises.
When I told the eldest daughter that she looked like a princess in her dress, she replied that such an observation must make me a dragon, and I should do my dragon duty by chasing and trying to devour her. In my spontaneous dragon voice, scarce more than a gravelly whisper, I informed the child that I had been a dragon for longer than she could understand, that I was forced to take on my present, boy-shaped form centuries ago to escape the persecution of those like her who thought of my kind only as killers and savages.
I told her that dragons abducted princesses only so the princesses would be their friends: so the princesses would cook for them, and clean their caves, and deftly weave the kinds of little beauties that scaly dragon claws could never manage. The dragons would tell the loved ones of the princesses that they’d eaten their daughters because the dragons knew those people wanted to believe it, making it easier for the dragons to be left alone.
In becoming a mirror or a canvas for these children, all of us who still held on to our inner kinder saw the children as mirrors for us as well. While reflecting on how fluidly the telling of the dragon’s tale came to me, the two mirrors aligned, and I tumbled into their infinite regress. I started to wonder if it might not be true: if I might not have been a dragon this entire time and had forgotten, or if it might not have been a previous life.
Perhaps all of us little boys who fantasize about dragons and dinosaurs descended from them—perhaps we had always been them. And all the little girls: might they not have been the faeries and the unicorns and the birds? We, the Thunder Lizards, and them, the Airy Spirits?
What if I had previously been a tree and a dragon and a god?
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