About a year ago, when my daughter was nearing four, we were out on a walk. She was balance-beaming on a high concrete lip that stretched alongside a schoolyard fence, and I was doing a syncopated little dance beside her, to keep my muscles agile in case I needed to lunge in any direction to catch her. Distracted by my over vigilance, I was taken aback when she stopped, wheeled at me, and said, with the kind of ferocity small children possess, “Who made this world?!”
I would like to say I provided an answer so elegant and sage that she, satisfied and now claiming the wisdom of the elders, carried on her way. But to be honest, I bungled it, or at least I felt I did. I offered a rambling narrative that included possibly all, but not limited to, the following: God, the Big Bang Theory, tectonic plates shifting, Darwin’s finches, Nature, and as I hazily recall, something about meteorites and dinosaurs. Her response, however, heartened me. She leapt down, ran forward on the sidewalk, and throwing her arms skyward, cried, “Who made this world?!”
I realized, later, that the encounter gets to the heart of why narrative matters so much to me. Why I esteem it; why I have dedicated the business of my life to reading and writing stories. Not only because we have always shared stories to make sense of our world, but more remarkably, because we are never done with them. We are never done with revising and refining them. Never done with clarifying them. Never done with taking pleasure in them. There my daughter was, curiosity intact, asking the question again, open to more.
This post is part of our Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts is meaningful to them. Lit Matters stories will be posted throughout the month of November, leading up to Colorado Gives Day on December 9. Mark your calendar for Colorado Gives Day or schedule your gift now. Thank you!
