The faerie harps are calling...

I was planning on writing an entry last night, something not related to potato latkes or any other food, festive or not, for that matter, but Hubby rented a movie which Buddy Boy and I joined him in watching, a film touted on the cover as being a comedy, and it was not. Not that that is a bad thing, for it was an excellent film anyway, but we kept wondering when the funny stuff was going to happen. I shall link it, for I do not want to draw the attention of search engines to my diary, and this is one time where I can’t fudge the spelling sufficiently to avoid them. I noticed when I looked it up that it’s classifed as drama; how in the world did it ever get labeled as a comedy? But, as I said, it was very good, and I recommend it. Seriously. Just don’t expect to be laughing too much, or at all.

I finished the book I was reading (I am slowly but surely working my way through that box of books on the floor beside my bed, even though it never seems to get any emptier) and had a bit of a revelation regarding my outlook on life. One of the reasons I like this author so much is because he writes what he has coined “urban fantasy”. His stories take place in urban settings, city streets, alleyways, apartment buildings, coffee shops, but include elements of faerie within them: pixies come out of computer monitors, a house elf becomes partner in a book shop, there really are scary things living in the shadows that pool in the corner of your room and under your bed, your childhood imaginary friend really did exist and comes back to save you when you have come to the attention of the soul eaters. He’s a great story teller too, and once you start reading, it’s hard to put him down. Best of all, he’s Canadian. His earlier books were set in his hometown of Ottawa, but in more recent years they describe a fictional city somewhere in the U.S., and he introduces characters who recur throughout so that there’s a fair bit of character development going on.

Anyway, having said all that, there was talk in this most recent novel of souls, and the fact that people have them but fairies don’t, and how the protagonist (a teenage girl) was saying to her childhood not-so-imaginary friend that everyone has a soul, how could they not, except the soul eaters were not interested in her friend, but in her; and of course it got me to thinking about how I don’t really believe in much of anything unless it can be scientifically proven to me or I can experience it with my own senses, which accounts for many of my attitudes regarding why we’re here (it was an accident) to where we go after we die (back into the system).

However, just as a religious agnostic is someone who doesn’t know if there is a god or not but fervently wishes there were, I must face up to the fact that I am a faerie agnostic, if there is such a thing. I’m pretty sure that fairies and the like don’t exist, not ever having experienced them first-hand, but I am always reading books about them, about magic and about people who have adventures with the Otherworld, and I have to admit, a little tentatively, that I really wish it were all true. I would love to go for a walk in the woods and see Little People living in the gnarled bole of an ancient wild apple tree, or discover that we have a house elf who cleans the place at night when we’re all sleeping (now that would be a treat), or little twig men hiding among the current bushes. It never happens. Looking at the world from the corners of my eyes, I have never caught a glimpse of anything but the mundane.

So I live my life, my rather boring, ordinary life, constantly wishing for something magical to happen. Children, who don’t yet have the education to know how electricity works or how the magician produces the rabbit from the hat, are constantly enraptured with the wonder of the world around them. We all want to experience things through the eyes of a child, as though we are discovering them for the first time, because as we get older and wiser, we also become more jaded. I want that kind of magic in my own life, not to see it through someone else’s eyes, but to actually experience it on my own. When our children start losing that sense of wonder, when they realize that the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are really rôles that Mummy and Daddy take on and are not real in and of themselves, we lose something, too. I guess that’s one reason we should keep having children in society, so that there is always a generation of people discovering things for the first time.

But my children are adults now. It will be a while before I have grandchildren. I watch for movement just on the periphery of my vision, check to see if the butterfly alighting on the cosmos is really an insect or not, listen intently for fairy music in the blowing of the wind. So far, nada. So, I guess I�ll just keep reading.

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