Think of a Fantasy

When I was six, a concerned mother called my mom. "Hello, is this Terrianne's mother? I live down the street from you, and I wanted to let you know that your daughter has been giving flying lessons to all the neighborhood kids, including my daughter! You hear of people jumping off buildings because they think they can fly, and well, I'm just a little concerned." Guilty!

The truth is I had recently seen the live theatre production of Peter Pan at Portland Civic Theatre. I, myself, was doing a show there, playing Baby June in the musical Gypsy, and my parents took me to the matinee production of Peter Pan, which was playing at the same time on the theatre's Blue Room stage. I was positively captivated by the magical world of Peter, Wendy, and Tinkerbell, so much so that I invented my own fantasy world and shared it with all my friends. And yes, that included flying lessons. I made everyone tie capes around their necks and jump off the picnic table in our backyard over and over, pretending to fly. The higher and farther they could jump, the better.

But it didn't end there. I also told them that the beach was under our cement patio. There was a small hole in the concrete, maybe three inches across, and the hole was filled with sand. So I told everyone that was the beach under there and that it needed to be fed. The beach liked to eat leaves and berries, grass, etc., and had to be fed three times daily. If I was going to be away from home, I'd set up a schedule and make my friends come over to feed the beach. Looking back now, what amazes me most is not this wild imagination, but the fact that these kids would actually do it. They did what I said. They would come over to my house, go out into the backyard, and put leaves into the hole in our patio.

And they would do other things I required. I made up an entity called "cold-heat." It was a clothes pin clipping hold of a cotton ball. The tricky part was the cotton ball had to remain wet at all times. If it dried out, cold-heat would die. My friends and I each had our own cold-heat, and we spent most of school recesses running to the drinking fountain in order to keep the cotton balls wet. When we wanted to do other things, we would find a babysitter. There was an amazing educator at the school named Mr. Cava. He taught 3rd grade (we were in 1st grade at the time), but he was always willing to babysit cold-heat during recess. He would stuff all these clothes pins and wet cotton balls into his pockets. This made it possible for me to give more flying lessons. There was a grassy hill at the very end of the school yard, and we could run down that hill and then use the momentum to propel us forward as we jumped, pretending to fly.

Years later, the friends had changed, but the desire for a fantasy life did not. I created an organization called "The Order of the Pillows." By this time I was a young teenager and member of a service organization called The International Order of Rainbow for Girls. At Rainbow slumber parties and at the yearly 3-day slumber party (AKA Grand Assembly), I made all the girls practice with pillows. We would lie on our backs and throw pillows into the air, in various twirling patters, then catch them on our feet. I made up whole routines with these pillows, and we would all learn them and perform them for whomever would watch. I invented a persona named Jean Escar, whom I said was the founder of the organization. I would write her name in phone books in the yellow pages under "Pillows." I still sort of believe in her. Until Google replaced phone books just a few years ago, I continued to write her name in all the phone books in our home. Despite what my husband and children thought, it made me happy to know that Jean was alive and well and still supervising The Order of the Pillows.

I hadn't thought about any of this in quite a long while, until Facebook recently connected me with the little girl whose mom was the one who called mine all those years ago with her concern about the flying lessons. Kathy commented, "I still have fond memories of the magical fantasy world you created when we were little." Ha, she remembers.