Harry and the Box
Tue Apr 29, 2008 at 05:56:07 PM PDT
I write for (part of) my living. Typically I write personal and narrative essays and the like, on educational themes. Today, though, I've had this burning need to get this other thing on paper. Normally, I'd have gotten it down and started sending it to my normal publishers, but this is different and I wouldn't even know where to begin publishing it and I'd like some feedback on it and well...my experience has been that, if I don't get these things out in the world when they come to me then they evaporate and I see them elsewhere later on. It may sound crazy, but I really believe that God or Allah or some other thing whispers these ideas in my ear sometimes, and that there's a "do this or I'm going to get someone else to do it" urgency to it. So here it is. Hopefully, I'll be able to sleep tonight.
I have to admit- it's wicked scary to do this this way.
Harry and the Box
Once upon a time, there was a box. And in that box, were all the things that people think that other people are supposed to be. There are boxes marked "Moms" and "Dads" and "Women" and "Men"...there are a lot of boxes, but this story is just about one of them. This box was marked "Little Boy" and inside of it were things like "rough and tumble" and "good at sports" and "not afraid of anything" and other things like that.
There was also a little boy. His name was Harry. He knew lots of things, like how to build a Monster Truck Race Car Space Ship out of Legos and how to dam a puddle so that the water changed course and how nice it was to snuggle and how beautiful the sunrise could be...
But he didn’t know about the box.
Harry started school. He learned about spiders and circle time and how to put just the right spaces between his words when he wrote them. He learned about numbers and penguins and panda bears...
And he learned about the box.
When Harry looked in the box, he saw lots of things he could do. He liked to wrestle and play soccer. He liked to run and swing on the swings and dig in the dirt. But he saw lots of things that he didn’t do well yet. He couldn’t ride his bike without training wheels, and he couldn’t catch his baseball in his glove and he couldn’t always hit the ball when his dad pitched it to him and he was afraid of the dark sometimes.
But there were lots of things he could do that weren’t in the box at all. He could be a good friend to the new kid in school, even when other people thought that kid was weird. He could make up really real stories about flying through space and sailing on pirate ships. He could build with his blocks and play his drums...but still. What if his mom and dad and his friends wouldn't like anymore because he didn't fit into the box? He was sad because the box was everything little boys were supposed to be- and he just didn't fit.
Then Harry noticed that his friends didn’t all fit the box. Ella could hit the ball every time and she was a girl and he didn't that that hitting the ball was in the "Little Girl" box. Juan couldn’t ride his bike without training wheels and Sean didn’t even like sports. So he decided (with his mom and his dad and his sister and Ella and Juan and Sean) to make their own boxes. In Harry’s box, he put his Legos and his space shuttle and his made-up stories and his drums...and he left off one side.
Because Harry figured that there’d be lots of stuff to add to it.
