The Fairy Tale

As a little girl, I didn't care about dolls or fairy tales. I had them, but... they seemed too fake. I've always hated hypocrisy, you know? When I was seven or eight, Mom took all six of us to Toys R Us to buy goodies with our Christmas money. I spent the whole afternoon roaming up and down, watching my siblings buy legos or Barbies or games. I couldn't bring myself to choose anything; I felt lost in a sea of pink plastic. My sole purchase of the day was a pencil sharpener.

I was a toy-hater, but I wasn't abnormal enough to disdain horses. Many little girls love horses, but I was one of those who happened to live on a farm, and happened to have a mom who had been an equestrian. My parents bought me a picture-perfect white pony, whom I, in my innocence, named "Treasure."

In fairy tales the ponies are white, but they are also sweet and well-behaved. Treasure was neither. She rolled and got dirty. She ran away in the middle of the heaviest snowfall that Virginia had seen in a decade. She took off with me into the herd of black Angus cows. She yanked the reins out of my hands in order to eat grass through her bridle. She made my riding life a constant battle.

But Mom had it right, as usual--Treasure was perfect for me. I learned the first lesson of fairy tales: it's never as easy as it looks... and it wouldn't be real if it were. I still didn't think much of Cinderella stories at that time, but I did begin to learn what a coward I was, and I certainly learned that when you fall off a horse, the very first thing you must do is get right back up. Otherwise you get skittish, and the horse gets cocky.

Fast-forward five years. Me, a thirteen-year-old with half a decade of horses under her belt. I'd been knocked off against walls by loco horses, and I'd fallen off over a jump with my Arab, and I knew all about getting back up, sore but determined. We decided that I was ready for a high-stepping Thoroughbred, ready to tackle the shows. I was still scared of horses, and I always will be. But I loved them more than I feared them, and I knew how to be the boss.

A horse, to me, isn't an animal. A horse is a poem, with four feet to measure out the line, and the whole dictionary of personalities behind its big dark eyes. You can ride it metrically in an arena, with boots and a hardhat and subtle pressures of the leg to put it through its paces. Walk. Trot. Canter. Or you can ride it free verse, bareback with a halter and a lead line for reins and the fields for an arena. Either way the feet beat out a rhythm. Either way, any way, always, it's poetry.

The thoroughbred was a beautiful mare, big and sleek. I was going to call her Penny for her copper coat. She was my birthday present... until, just one week before deliver, a freak accident in the field killed her. In the wake of Penny's death, my parents stepped back to reevaluate the situation. They decided that my preoccupation with horses was preventing me from becoming interested in more important things, like friends.

"I want to be alone! I like being alone! You think that the girls from church can be my friends? They're city girls, and they don't understand anything! Why should I have friends? You think that everybody needs friends, but it's not true."

"Honey, every human being needs friends."

I didn't believe them. We had moved around through most of my growing-up years, and had only recently relocated to Maryland from Virginia. My friends had been few, and my friendships short. I could read. I had horses, and siblings if it came to human interaction. The girls from church treated me with a certain coldness because of my large vocabulary and enormous arrogance. I don't blame them now, but I certainly didn't want to be around them then.

Nevertheless, the horses went. I learned the second lesson of a fairy tale... losing what you love. We always know that the princess' handsome prince is waiting somewhere down the road, so we never feel sorry for the Cinderellas who are orphaned. At the time, however, being orphaned must have been a sorrow seemingly beyond all redemption by future happy events. I wasn't even sensible enough to be grateful for my living, loving parents. I grieved for the next two years, pushed the church girls away harder than ever, and sought every opportunity to return to my equestrian life.

Age fifteen. Third lesson of a fairy tale: hard work and dirt... and human filthiness. My parents allowed me to take a job at a local riding stable, as a barn hand. Looking back now, I don't know what the owner was thinking. Most of the horses there were worth upwards of $10,000, and all my coworkers were adults or older teens. I should never have been given such a responsible position, but I didn't know it at the time. During my six months there, I worked harder physically than I ever have before or since.

On average, I spent five hours a day mucking stalls, carrying heavy water buckets, wrestling big horses, and attracting dirt. My first act upon coming home was always a shower, then rest. I got up at 5:30 AM every Saturday morning for those twenty-four weeks, and as the weather got colder, my tasks only seemed to get heavier. Often, I was the only person on duty for the morning or evening shift. It was up to me to lead in, feed, muck out, water, and clean up after thirty horses, each weighing many times what I did, and each equipped with teeth, kicking hooves, and the wicked three-year-old mind of an equine.

One of my coworkers, a girl of college-student age, overdosed on drugs. I came in one morning to receive the news that she had died, apparently unintentionally. When the shock wore off, all I could think of was that she had been alive, and I had talked with her... and now, she, dead. Another girl ran with her high school's drama crowd and knew more than I ever wanted to about sex. A third, our only male coworker, drank. It was a safe enough environment nonetheless, or my parents would not have allowed me to continue, though I don't think that they knew everything about my coworkers. Still, no one ever mistreated me, and much of what was going on passed over my head. I was very, very innocent. But I still believed that horses were poetry, and I still dreamed of reentering the horse world as a rider. I wanted a crop for a vorpal blade... not a pitchfork.

There was nothing fake about the Barn. It was all too real. By now I had been through a stage of liking fairy tales. I had read dozens of them, and could mix or match elements of the stories for my own writing...but the sheer number of them and the similarities from story to story left my cynical, bored. Oh yes, I was beginning to write. Why? Because I had read most of the childrens' classics, and the other books at the library disgusted me. I didn't really think that I could do better, but trying was an improvement over reading Elsie's First Kiss.

Which reminds me... a word about my attitude towards boys. Disdain. I had one crush all through high school, and otherwise boys may as well have been nonexistant. I figured them for housebabies, anyway. So they did soccer and basketball. So what? I had had tennis, a little golf, volleyball, and my beloved horses. I got as dirty in one day at the barn as they did in two or three practices. To put it simply, I wasn't impressed. I also found makeup and "girly-girl" stuff unspeakably dull; I remember complaining to Mom when some of the girls with whom I was supposed to be socializing had had an entire conversation about deodorant brands.

Fairy tales? Yeah, right. Forget Prince Charming--boys are gross. Forget the white horse--been there. Castles are still cool, but the inevitable fairy-tale ending of marriage involved a kiss. Um... no.

That summer I became a Christian, which is a whole different story, and began to live in light of Christ's birth, life, death, and ressurection--what Tolkien called "the greatest Fairy Tale of all." I was remade and adopted into the royalest House, yet I did not understand. I knew that Christ loved me, knew it beyond the shadow of a thought of my fierce former doubts, and I was beginning to understand that I loved Him, but it wasn't a fairy tale to me. It was simply reality, the brightest, richest, most astonishing reality I had ever known, one that made it seem as though I had been living a black-and-white life, but was reborn into color.

At sixteen I discovered the adult classics, and my world did another flip-flop. Over the next two years I read Dickens and Austen and Mitchell and Spenser. I read Shakespeare, Hugo, Dumas, Cervantes, Milton, Marlowe, Goethe, Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Spurgeon, and Augustine. I read Lewis and Tolkien, Steinbeck and Bradford, Franklin and Madison, Bronte and Scott. Most of all I began to seriously read the Bible.

And I began to like fairy tales. I liked their simplicity, so reminiscent of Christ's parables. I liked the way that they could reduce a complicated reality to true principles. I found in them colors--Prussian blue, purple, saffron, scarlet, black, and gold. I found in them Lewis' stained-glass Christianity.

At this time also I had my first overseas experience of two weeks in Italy. I came back different, but in such subtle ways that I did not at first realize it. What I learned in Italy, in Rome especially, was an appreciation for the weight of Church history. I have touched the graves of first-century Christians, and I have stood in the great Circus, and I saw centuries of faith beneath my feet. Truly, we stand on the shoulders of giants...but we stand with them equally at the cross. This particular fairy tale began to seem to me a very long and involved one, composed of more characters and more fantastic events than I had ever encountered.

Home again, I began to think about college. I visited PHC, wound up sitting next to DuMee in Freedoms, and made the incalculable error of raising my hand. I didn't know any better, but Dr. Stacey actually called on me. I commented on his diagram of Monarchy, Oligarchy, and Democracy. He riposted. I countered. I'm sure he got the better of the discussion, and that my question merely revealed my ignorance, but the details have mercifully been forgotten.

Freshman Fall. My roommate and I were walking up to Founders one mellow evening about a week after Orientation. She said, "I can't believe we're here! Can you? We'll come out of here Presidents and Congressmen! We're gonna shake the world!"

I smiled cynically. Unlike most freshmen, I had no illusions about nation-leading or writing a best-seller. Remember my fairy tale lessons. I knew that the white pony is a stubborn beast, that you lose your dreams, and that real life is hard work. Yet I also understood enough about my God to be sure that fairy tales reflect reality in this: the ultimate ending is happy.

But I was afraid. What if I couldn't make the grade at this difficult, elite school? Socially, my long years of semi-reclusiveness made relationships difficult. I got on with the girls well enough, for in my latter years of high school I had developed several close friendships. Laura. Jessica. Tope. Laura is at Hillsdale now. Jessica is in nursing school. Tope just finished her undergrad at Duke, but she's doing grad studies at Harvard. No rest for the weary... or the superintelligent. Laura and I were at Starbucks together this afternoon. She's going to read theology with me over Break. It was Jessica who readjusted my perspective a few weeks ago when I badly needed it, and returned my attention to the cross. I saw Tope at church this morning. She's learning to crochet. These dear girls are loving and loyal, willing to confront my sin, ready to laugh. My parents were right. I need friends.

Boys were an entirely different story. None of them measured up to my brothers, in my eyes. Housebabies. I got a reputation as a cold fish, which I deserved. I got a reputation for being proud and aloof. I deserved that too. I did very well academically, and tried to ignore my desperate homesickness. Night after night, I would slip outside to stand by the pond or in the fields opposite our dorms and pray. I was consumed with loneliness, but increasingly Christ became my all-in-all. It was necessarily so, for who was there else?

I almost didn't come back after Winter Break, but hard-learned lessons stay with you. I got back up on the horse. After talking with some of the guys whom I knew slightly, I saw how badly I had behaved towards my male classmates, and began the difficult process of breaking down my own walls. Guys were pain and trouble, and I wanted nothing to do with them... but they were also unavoidable. I adapted. They weren't my brothers, but I had no right to judge them by such an arbitrary standard. They frightened me, but I had not right to make preemptive attacks. In the Fall I had used my tongue like a dagger. I learned, slowly, to make a plowshare of it. The harvest has been in golden friendships, painful and troubling at times, but it's never as easy as it looks... and it wouldn't be real if it were.

I had a new word for The Fairy Tale now, gleaned from my classes. It was "metanarrative," and somehow the color had begun to seep out with the new name. Further I plunged into intellectualism, seeking truth, finding only theories. Kant. Kierkegaard. Rousseau. Sometime in my Sophomore spring, toward the end of Freedoms II, I shocked even myself by exclaiming to Dr. Stacey in class, "Sir, they're all so close and so far and so wrong and I'm sick of it!" That was the semester that I had Nietzsche in both Freedoms and Philosophy. I called my texts for those classes "poison which must be read," and with increasing sincerity referred to the Bible as my "antidote."

I knew that I had lost something important. I felt grey and ashy. In my desperation I reverted to very silly schoolgirl nonsense about fairies in Lake Bob, and guardian angels who lived in the lamps on campus. The color seemed gone, so I invented a mythology to restore it, but all I earned was a new reputation... this time for being "romantic" and "out of touch with reality." The last stung most, for I could not bear to be thought of as one who lived in a pink plastic world.

Something happened last summer. Looking back, I suppose you could say that I learned how to be glad. I spent much time with God, rediscovering The Fairy Tale and renewing my mind. As Christ filled my vision, it seemed to me that everything had become cross-shaped. I felt as though my soul were indeed a lamp, and that its walls grew thinner, the flame more clearly distinguished. I felt like the burning bush, for I was on fire but was not eaten up...and yet at the same time...well, I understood better than ever why it is written, "our God is a consuming fire."

I returned to school, and began to drop the Fairy of Lake Bob out of my conversation, except of course for the Legend of Lake Bob, which I still enjoy for its absurdity, and for the number of in-jokes woven into it. I still love to detour behind Dorm 5 on my way to and fro, just to look out over Lake Bob. I love to go there at night especially, to cup my hands around the lamppost's glow and stare across the blue water, or at the winedark sky.

The Fairy Tale ever deepens, in dark colors as well as bright. I keep waiting for something to give out, keep expecting the Freshman and Sophomore cynicism to return, or the overwhelming trials of last semester to crush from me my hope and joy. Apparently, however, a Princess of the House of Jehovah is not permitted to come to lasting harm. It seems that God really is about the business of soul-making, and that I shall have gladness even in the midst of it, and that faith really will turn to sight, and prayer to praise.

I know of no princess whose King-Father took more care of her than mine does of me. I know of no greater Prince than Christ, my dear Lord. And while it is written that He shall return on a white horse, I very much doubt that it will be as naughty a beast as my Treasure was... and certainly not near so dirty.