Education came to me really young though because I developed different skills, Like I would draw out my own stories with only a blank piece of paper and pencils, those drawings would fill the page with a long fairy tale story using no words.
Looking back at myself I realize how quickly I grew into a story teller, with my memory for details, my every experience not always explained to me very good from my parents, but there for the taking in however I grew from it.
The book sale was huge, those big brown boxes laid up against the wall. I wasn't sure where I was but shopping for bargain books with my mom was an all day event so I settled in. Books only with pictures were my eye's focus. I remember sitting against the wall in the corner of the book sale lost in wonder by the amazingly huge book I had found. The full pages of art work, details into other details on just one page told a whole story for my untrained eyes. Words looked magical even though it would be several years later when I actually read this book.
It was a classic Fairy tale book, full of all the real information to each popular short story in the Fairy tales...It was pure fantasy to me!
That afternoon I looked over the heavy big book from cover to cover, I sat in amazement by the colors, those fairies with wide wing spans, the trolls with crazy hair and witches with green skin and the life like pictures sucked me in until I could figure out what was going on! I really was excited to discover this book from the big box sale and I carried it up to my chest as my mother said "No." I began to protest and beg her as I showed her how artistically it was, how it told short stories with really big pictures. "No Debby it's a fairy tale book." My mother waved me on as she was shopping only to glance my way annoyed. "No those stories are not good to fill your head, they are not even real." I paused holding the book out to take in the colorful cover asking my mother uncertain by her reaction "So what are they?" she snorted back "Fairy tales, not real, not true and not good.....now Debby STOP asking we are not buying that book, it's not honoring to God." I sighed sadly but found another spot to sit and look through the pages while we were still there. The scary looking guy who spun straw into gold, the children pushing a witch into the fireplace and the house in the cloud where a bean grew a huge vine over night.....then feeling a bit freak out over the stories I couldn't figure out just by looking over the pictures. By the end of the afternoon I had memorized the drawn details in this book, No one had ever told me about fairy tales as a kid I grew up with stories from the bible (rather a different style of "fairy tales" one that some say even my parents say are REAL but really I think it just holds life lessons like the classic fairy tales of our past) As a little girl that afternoon I kept holding onto the book of pictures, I knew if it looked bad or scary I should turn the page my mother was always telling me God can see what I see and knows when I see bad things, things I shouldn't ever see so sometimes I would close my eyes hoping God wasn't watching through my eyes at scary pictures of the bad queens and bad magic filled pages....This was a wonderland of mixed emotions in all of these new pictures and stories for me! I held on to this book tightly for the whole time my mother shopped. A few hours later when my mother was checking out and leaving she told me to put the book back but the cashier lady said I could keep it for free because of all my mother's other purchases. The joy and excitement I felt was amazing! I carried the heavy book with me all the rest of the day and even slept close by with it that first night thinking of how lucky I was to get the book for myself. My mother annoyingly went along with the whole situation, often explaining to me how important God was to believe in over the fairy tales. I never understood why the book always made her uncomfortable, that she kept telling me through the years of that book on my shelf, that the black magic parts in those stories are of Satan and the good parts are of God, yet the fairy tale book was never to be thought of as real stories because only the bible was actually the real stories............... So now that I am older I realize what she was so afraid of! She was afraid that my imagination could grow outside of "Jona and the Whale", of "Water into wine" or "Fire from heaven" from the bible to "Kissing frogs for the right prince" or "falling down rabbit holes" from my newly found book!
My fantasy world came to me like magic one day when I was little, when I couldn't even read and I was forever changed into hoping there was maybe a fairy godmother watching over me also, I now LOVE watching magical movies and that incredible new TV series "Once Upon a Time..."
For life is made real only by believing!
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