Unicorns, Sloths and the Enduring Imagination of Childhood

Just now…

Harlan: The baby is stuck in a cave!

Cerys: No it’s not a baby, it’s a kid! Mom, Harlan’s trying to take my kid unicorn out of the cave!

Harlan: No it’s not, it’s a baby and it’s stuck!

Cerys: We have to tell it to stop growling at us!

Remember how it used to be as a kid when everything came with a story? A shrub became a fortress. A forest was pulsating with unknown creatures just waiting to show themselves.

I still think I saw a sloth in the hills of southern Ohio when I was a child. I walked down the trail away from my friends, followed it around a bend and could no longer hear their voices. My hackles went up. I was going into the unknown. And just at that moment I saw it. On the trunk of a tree in front of me. The sloth. It clung to the bark with its back to me and turned its head to look over its shoulder. I ran back to the safety of my friends. But the image stayed with me. I do not wish to grow older, “wiser,” and to lose this story. I choose to cultivate an ability to see the world in this way, however absurd and irrational it may be in light of the supposedly more immediate concerns of commerce and politics and whatever else creeps in and crowds out that childlike exuberance. I choose to envision a South American tree-climbing mammal in the hills of southern Ohio despite the overwhelming and adult evidence that I’m off my trolley.

Just a few years ago my sister and I caught a glimpse of a mountain lion on the highest, most forested spot of our family’s ancestral farm. We were on a hay wagon being pulled along with the rest of our family. It was the family reunion and this tradition of the hay ride endured in spite of the attendants’ more immediate concerns — like not getting food poisoning from the fried chicken. A tail is all we saw. Too long and low to be a fox or coyote. No one else saw it. Mountain lions are not generally in this area. There are stories of them and now and then random roadkill evidence of their presence. But they are there in the hills, living their lives unaffected by our stresses. Was that what we saw that day? I’m sticking with yes.

I just read that scientists have determined that we have thousands of daydreams a day. And that they last an average of 14 seconds. We have stories within us. We concoct stories based on moments as short as a glimpse. A glimpse of a couple saying goodbye at one of their cars on a Sunday morning. A glimpse of a girl half smiling as her significant other engages her best friend in a conversation we cannot hear. The look on a young girl’s face looking off above the ridges as her parents inform her of her grandfather’s passing. Snapshots.

When we become cognizant of our propensity toward story, we can cultivate it. It becomes an escape. It becomes a reminder that we can feel raw emotion. Is that escape? Or is that the opposite? Is that a hunkering down into the nuances of reality and not an escape at all?

I want to be aware of the story that lurks like the mountain lion on the edges of its known territory. The story that situates itself as absurdly as a sloth in southern Ohio. It is behind everything we see on a regular day. This is one of the gifts of this time I have as a stay-at-home parent, the opportunity to engage the vivid imaginations of these little humans. And this will not last forever. As Harlan recently said, “that’s gonna be a long time ago.” It’s also why I write, to tap this lurking energy. It is there for the observing. I want to be aware of the stories in my head. Harlan and Cerys will not settle for anything less. Now if you will excuse me, I need to go find out where that unicorn is and how in the world it got stuck in that cave.