Breakfast Fairies and the Mythology Sponge
When I was but a wee lad, I once awoke unusually early one morning. Rubbing sleep from my eyes I stumbled into the dining room with my sisters and there before us was an incredible sight. The table was covered with orange juice, toast, cereal, and all manner of wonderful smelling and tasting breakfast delights. But it was so early, we thought! How could it be that such a spread, with the spoons and bowls so carefully placed, with the soft boiled egg cups laid out with such care, be available already? Surely this was not the work of human hands. Perplexed, we asked my father what ever could have happened. He assured us that it was the result of a visit by the breakfast elves.
Throughout my childhood I would wake up with excitement when the morning felt just right, wondering if the breakfast elves had come. Their visits were rare, and so that much more delightful. Sadly, today my dad swears he doesn’t remember any of this. I have to assume that it was one of those offhand comments parents make that, however small, eagerly fill the large space in a child’s head so ready for explanations. The most exciting stories grow the largest, filling that space like the smell of cooking pancakes fills a house of sleepers.
A few weeks ago we had one of our large theme parties, this one calling for Fractured Fairy Tales. I broke out a few of my favorite bits from my costume collection and created a Breakfast Elf.
Sarah McDonald, Ori Sofer, Kai Mantsch
While I did spend a fair amount of time explaining the story, it was all part of the fun. At some point I was speaking exclusively in a bad Russian accent after trying to show a Baba Yoga how it was done, based entirely on my memories of my Russian friend Kostya Akimov saying things like, “Vodka with really crispy pickles”.
The whole thing reminds me of one of the objectives that’s emerged for my children’s song projects. Feeding small humans incomplete ideas and images allows them to fabricate something wonderful to fill in all of the gaps in understanding. “Pass the Sleepy Stick” is a great example. I never really explain what a sleepy stick might be, but I sing about it in context and give the general impression that it’s some kind of baton passed from sleepers on one part of the world to those next in line as the earth rotates away from the sun. I love the idea that kids who hear this song will create their own ideas of how this thing looks and acts and carry that with them for the rest of their lives, puzzling years later as to how they created and believed such a fantastical image.
For some reason I’ve never quite stopped putting together these crazy explanations for my world. My eagerness to jump to the most illogical, fantastic, explanation for things has earned me all kinds of hassle through the years. I was getting a ride with an older friend in jr. high school and he was trying to explain album rock radio to me. “When most radio stations are playing the single from an album”, he said, “album rock stations play something else off the same album.”
My mind boggled at how this could be true. How could all of those other stations know exactly when the singles were going to start? And what about songs that were different lengths? Did they just cut them off so they could start the next one at exactly the right time? I started imagining all kinds of elaborate schemes for keeping everything in perfect sync, and started asking bizarre questions until my friend, after a lot of confusion, realized how far out I had gone and looked at me in total disbelief.
I’m lucky these days to have found a great group of people who still revel in exploring the absurdities of how things might work or what life could be. I think that having these sorts of wild, impossible ideas about what could be is at the root of beginning to ask why other ideas aren’t already, or why there’s no reason they couldn’t be. Maybe the next step in my songwriting, as I begin my next round in a few weeks, is to create the space for adults to start thinking this way again too.
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