BoomerGirl Diary

I cherish a mystical world my mother created for my sister and me as we were growing up. Her love came to us through puppets and magic and fairytale stories and a fair amount of teasing. My earliest memories are chimerical flights into make believe.

One bright morning I was in Grandma Green’s kitchen in Norton, Kan. I was playing with my clown-like puppet Happy, while mother entertained my sister Julie with another puppet, lavishly dressed in Victorian clothing, and called Polly. Happy and Polly became childhood institutions for Julie and me — symbolic of a happier world where all dreams come true.

A while later, Mom and Grandma towered above me, busily cooking while I played quietly on the linoleum floor. Growing bored with the puppet, I concentrated on Happy's candy cane-striped shoebox — the mottled cardboard walls and a musty smell as if a basement full of damp newspapers. Mother distracted me by pointing out two arch-shaped pieces of cardboard glued to the inside of the shoebox. She told me they were doors for Happy to escape to Never-Never Land when our family slept.

I stuck my head in the box and looked closely at those cardboard archways, trying to understand how this mystical transportation could occur. No light passed through them.

Suddenly, saffron sunlight streamed through the arches and for an unknown amount of time I was taken into a vision. My mother and grandmother remained behind and above me, perhaps amused with my careful analysis of the box, but I floated through those arches into a place full of light. They were behind me, immutable but not clearly visible. It could have been seconds, or minutes, but through Happy’s shoebox arches I drifted into the infinite: golden sunshine, warmth, comforting mothers in checkered aprons, cheerful cheery pies, freedom from tired bodies, wisdom and contentment.

From the other side of two Lilliputian doorways, I looked into Grandma’s kitchen and saw the familiar comfort of her polished domain, and I felt no fear. It was a floating feeling embraced by peace and acceptance. I was supposed to be there.

It is so easy for a rational adult to dismiss this childhood memory, perhaps a hallucination set free by speedy drugs poured into the system of an asthmatic child, or perhaps mingling of reality with a sleeping vision. There are so many ways to explain away something that could not have happened.

There is also the possibility that I had passed through the boundaries confining human perception into a place where fantasy and reality are one. Grandma Green is cooking a perfect Sunday dinner for her son and daughter-in-law, and a vibrant, much younger Lucille Richards Green is amusing herself by igniting the creativity of little souls. Perhaps reality transformed long enough for me to embrace a perfect place where she has now returned.