When I was a child, I loved Peter Pan. The Mary Martin version shown on television was an annual ritual, but its influence lasted throughout the year. I was the strongest and always chose to be Peter. The eldest of the family down the street was Wendy, and we forced our little sisters to play Captain Hook and Tiger Lily. I was plenty old enough to not believe in fairies, but I still lay in bed staring at the window, willing it to be flung open and Peter to fly into my room to take me off for adventures in Never Land. (It was very irritating that the window slid sideways instead of opening outwards to the stars and my bedroom was partly below ground, screened by bushes in a split-level. How pedestrian!)
In James Barrie’s play Peter tells us that when the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and that was the beginning of fairies. Now that I am ever-so-much more than twenty, that theory is still easy to believe when I hear my granddaughter, Bella, laugh. She hasn’t learned to smile politely at appropriate times. There is never malice in her laughter. No one is ever the brunt of her joke. The giggles and chortles and squeals of delight that spill out of her represent nothing but sheer joy.
I hear it when a tower of cardboard blocks tumbles down. I hear it when Mommy turns her upside-down to kiss her tummy. I hear it when she can hardly hold still long enough to get her clothes off and come into the hot tub with us or when her pink snowsuit appears and she knows she is going for an outing.
And whenever I hear it, I think of fairies.
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