Good morning one and all. It looks like there is finally a break in the rain. Don’t get me wrong, the rain at night does help me sleep better, but rain during the day often makes it feel as though the day is getting off to a slow start. I don’t need an encouragement to slow down my start. Mornings are not my happy place. I either sleep in or hit the ground running. A slow starting morning usually just means that I’m not getting anything done that day. But to each his own. So speaking of getting started, are you ready? Good. Let’s go then.
Hmmm. I think this one where I think I’ll need to think it through a little longer before I decide how I feel about it. I think it may depend on what happens with the story. Once I decide on the story, I’ll know how I like it. But it is going to require some thought.
Wednesday, December 8th: They say it is where the fairies dance every midsummer.
“They say it is where the fairies dance every midsummer,” the old man said.
Terry gave the old man a sneering look. “Fairies?” He repeated. Who did this crazy old man think he was? He was nearly eight years old. Eight and three quarters to be exact. He knew there weren’t any fairies. Fairies were things babies still believed in and little girls dressed up as for Halloween. His sister had four pairs of fairy wings. She wore them all around the house, dancing and spinning and waving her magic wand. The wand didn’t grant wishes, all it did was scatter glitter all over his train set. Last time the glitter got into the gears and caused the wheels to stick. When he borrowed a can of spray air from the home office to clean out the wheels and make everything work properly there was too much glitter for its arrival to be accidental.
When he confronted Annabelle she confessed that she was trying to get his train to fly by shaking fairy dust on it. She claimed it was to help him. He broke her fairy wand because of it and then was sentenced to two weeks of grounding. He had another two days tacked on when his parents realized he took the office supplies without asking.
He had no use for fairies, real or imagined.
“Don’t believe in fairies?” the old man asked.
Terry shook his head. He was supposed to call the old man Grandpa like he called his mom’s father. But this was his father’s father and while that technically meant that he was his grandfather, Terry hadn’t met the man before and wasn’t quite sure what to think of him. His mother called the old man a ‘sweet old dear’ and his father called him the ‘cracked old loonie’. Despite their differences both warned him that he might not want to believe everything that that his new grandfather told him.
Terry wasn’t entirely sure why they were leaving him with the old man anyway. Oh he knew what they told him. That they had to take his sister somewhere and that it was important and that he couldn’t come. But no one explained why he couldn’t come.
No one ever explained anything.
That’s why he had so many books. No one would take the time to explain to him how engines worked, but he had several books on cars and locomotives and even steam ships that broke it down for him so that he could figure it out himself. It seemed that no one had time to explain anything. He knew if they did he would understand. He understood the books even though they were written for older kids. He knew that if his parents would explain he would understand.
But they didn’t. they never thought he understood anything.
“Why don’t you believe in fairies,” the old man he was supposed to call Grandpa asked.
Terry made a face. “Because they aren’t real?” he replied. What a stupid question.
“They aren’t?”
Terry snorted. “No they are just something Disney made up so people will by things with Tinkerbell on them.”
The old man smiled. “You got that from your father,” he said. “Lord knows he has said the same to me many times before. But Tinkerbell existed before Disney and Fairies existed before Tinkerbell so it really isn’t much of an argument is it?”
Ten til Midnight 