 |
| Park |
Jayden was a
curious child. He was very curious indeed. He spent his days exploring the
world, studying all of the bugs and leaves and cracks in the sidewalks. The
world was just so big and complex. He loved it.
Every day he
asked his father and mother and teacher and grandmother and friends and mailman
and strangers walking down the street “Why?”
“Why are
some plants green and some not?”
“Why do
people wear shoes?”
“Why don’t
dogs talk like us?”
One day when
he was walking through the park with his mother he looked up at the sky. He
stopped on the sidewalk and just stood there looking. He looked for a whole
five minutes before he finally asked, “Mother, why do clouds fly? Why are they
up there? Why don’t they ever come down? You never see a cloud on the ground.
Why?”
His mother
thought for a moment. “Well, dear,” she said, “a very, very long time ago,
before you or I were born, mountains had wings. They flew gracefully through
the air. All of the people admired their beauty while they were in the air,
but, like all things that fly, sometimes they would get tired and land.
“When they
landed, they didn’t look where. They would crush people and animals and trees. They
would crush whole cities!
“Now the
gods saw this and were unhappy. The lives they were looking out for kept
getting crushed. The Lord of Heaven took his lightning bolts and threw them
down at the mountains to cut off their wings. He cut off all of the mountains’
wings except for one. That mountain flew away and hid in the ocean, but never
comes out for fear that he will lose his wings, too.
“All of the
wings from the mountains flew up into the sky and stayed there. Now they fly
around up there wherever they please, but they’re too light to come back down
to earth on their own. Those wings are what we call clouds.”
“Oh,” said
Jayden. “If the only reason they don’t come down to earth is that they’re too
light, why won’t anyone help them?”
His mother
wasn’t quite prepared for that question, so she answered, “well, people are
afraid that if the clouds come down to earth, they’ll join the mountains again
and they will fly around carelessly crushing whatever they land on again.”
“Oh,” said
Jayden, “okay.”
And they
continued their walk through the park.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Author's Note: This story is based on a story in William Buck's 1976 version of the Ramayana on page 226. I really wanted to paint a realistic picture of a realistic child having a conversation with a parent. The parent in this case isn't being too honest with the child, but parents lie to their kids about all kinds of things (Santa, the Tooth Fairy, where babies come from, etc.).
