Straw Into Gold

Alone in the forest, Rum lit a fire.  The flame pushed back the darkness and cast dancing shadows beneath the trees.  Rum loved the night.  The darker the better.  Overhead an owl hooted a forlorn invitation, a sound that tugged at Rum’s own loneliness.  But remembering his plan and the desperation of the queen, he brightened.  By the time the sun set on one more day, he would have a companion.  Someone to listen to his stories and drive away the melancholy.  It made Rum want to sing.  “What’s the harm,” he said to the night.  “There’s no one here but me, Rumpelstiltskin.”  At the sound of Rum’s voice, something skittered away in the leaves.  Rum held his breath and listened.  Perhaps, he wasn’t alone.  “You’re being foolish,” he said.  “It’s just a mouse.  Watch out, Mousie!  Old Man Owl’s hungry for a bedtime snack.”  He laughed and hooted as he danced around the fire.  Then he begin to sing.  Rum had set all of his secrets to music.  Tomorrow night, if his new guest was very good, he would sing to him.  Success was so close, he could almost smell the baby powder.  (Variation on the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin”)

My downstairs neighbor likes onions.  I know this because, at the oddest times, their pungent smell billows from my vents and saturates the air in my apartment.   Candles and air freshener barely tame the potency as each new cycle of the furnace or AC adds a fresh blast of oniony perfume.  The worst occurs when she cooks late in the evening and the aroma of Allium cepa blankets the air in my bedroom.  It’s offensive and upsetting and it reminds me that the life I’m living isn’t much like the life I want.  It’s times like these that I have to remind myself of Rumpelstiltskin and the danger of disappointment.

The story of the miller’s daughter and the strange little man who spins straw into gold is a tale about wanting.  The miller wants the favor of the king.  The king wants massive amounts of gold.  The maiden wants to survive.  And the little man really just wants someone to keep him company.  Fueled by horror movies and macabre fireside stories, I used to believe Rumpelstiltskin wanted the baby as the main course for his evening meal.  But in Germany where the Grimm brothers collected this tale, imps were portrayed as lonely creatures who craved human attention.  Knowing this, Rumpelstiltskin’s motives lost their evil overtones and I begin to have a little compassion for the short-sighted creature.  Of all the characters in the story, he is the only one willing to help the others reach their desires, but his assistance comes at a price.  In the end, it is Rumpelstiltskin who is left disappointed and in his disappointment he self-destructs.  

Of all of the fairy tales I’ve read across the course of my life, this one tweaks at my conscience in a very real way.  I’m sure I’ve played all of these characters, shifting from miller to king to maiden to imp, as I’ve single-mindedly gone after my own desires while ignoring the needs of others.   Day after day, the drama of dueling agendas plays itself out at our jobs, in our friendships and in our families, and like it or not, someone always walks away empty-handed and hurt.  We all take our turns at being Rumpelstiltskin.   As Mark Nepo says, “Sometimes we can’t get what we want.  While this can be disappointing and painful, it is only devastating if we stop there.”

With each disappointment comes an opportunity and a decision.  We can choose to stop where we are–one leg buried in the ground up to our thigh and our hands around the other pulling with all our might.  Or we can find a way to move forward.  I imagine that Rumplestiltskin’s story could have ended much differently.  Reaching out to the queen as a friend, and heavens knows she needed one, might have turned this story into one that ended happily ever after.  Or as Mick Jagger eloquently puts it, “you can’t always get what you want…but if you try sometimes, you find, you get what you need.”

A Kiss On The Cheek

The story I am about to tell you is absolutely true. 

One foggy, September morning a small group of six-year-olds huddled in the entry-way of a crumbling three-story building.  Brown eyes stared into blue.  Hands clutched large pencils and writing pads. Tears threatened.  Until this morning, many of the children had never been in a group of others their own age.  To them, first grade was so alien to everything they had previously encountered the parents might well have dropped them on Mars or abandoned them in the middle of a dark and frightening wood.  

Original photograph by Liliane Callegari

 

In this particular corner of the forest, a beautiful queen held sway.  She had dark hair, shiny red fingernails and glasses that gave her eyes a feline tilt.  She ruled with two faces—one for parents and one for her class.  One face always smiled and the other…well, the other didn’t.  She was a queen well-suited to her reign.  Fear was her broadsword.  Humiliation was her dagger.  She could sense weakness from across the room and, in the blink of an eye, would race down a row of desks to lift an offending first grader out of her chair, digging those bright red nails into the tender place behind a little ear.  The children thought she knew their bad thoughts even before they thought them. 

As the days passed the children became very well behaved, but they stayed patient, waiting for a chance to escape.  Sometimes when the queen would lock them in the classroom while she went across town for lunch, the children would boost one of their number over the radiator and out the window.  Once outside, the child would run to unlock the door and free the first graders.  Into the sunshine they would dash and drink in the fresh air like it was nectar, but they were always careful to lock themselves back in the room before the queen returned.  When spring came and the trees and bushes burst with leaves, the children would hide beneath the hedgerow at the edge of the playground and create worlds without rules or rulers, until the day they missed the recess bell and the queen had the hedgerow cut down.  

By May, the children were wise in the ways of survival.  They had learned many things, not to cry when the queen made you stand alone before the class, not to listen when one of your friends was locked in the closet, and not to tell your parents.  For the parents had only seen the queen’s smile as she claimed a kiss from each child at the end of every day.  The years ahead would bring new kings and queens in different realms, but the memory of kissing that powdered cheek would never go away. 

On the list of names for the 1958 first grade class at my rural Missouri school, you won’t find Hansel and Gretel, but they were there.  The little boy scratching at the supply closet door begging to be released and the spunky girl climbing over the window sill and racing to free her classmates might well have stepped off the pages of a Grimm brothers’ tale.  Did we think in those terms at the time?  I’m sure we didn’t.  But I can’t help but think that on some level the insanity of our first grade year was survivable, because our parents and grandparents had told us the old tales.  Joseph Campbell believed the old familiar stories provided a sense of perspective for our lives and the tale of the two children who manage to outwit the old woman seems tailor made for those times when your wits and patience are the only advantages you have.