Barefoot Across Sunshine Days

So a man enters my office today.  I am taken by intuition, and I interrupt him.

“Do you have kids?”

“Yes.”

“Boys?”

“Yes?” He’s beginning to look a bit worried now.

“A woman, too. Wife, partner?”

“Yes.”

“There may have been an incident.” I raise my hand. “Not a bad one. Um.”

“Oh no, did they spray paint your office?”

“No! Do they do that? Awesome!” I gaze at my boring white paint.

He just looks at me. Right.

I’m suddenly positive he’s the dad of the kids I told the dragon story to. You know, the kids who were nagging their mom about wanting to visit the first floor. The ones I told, “you don’t want to visit the first floor. The ninth floor has the dragon.”

When she told them they were not going there either, she had to pry her kids’ fingers off the doorway. They haven’t been back. So I try to sound sane and reassuring.

“You see, a woman walked in with kids desperate to head to the first floor but she was busy.” He nods. “Very busy. So I stepped in to save the day.” I look at him gravely. “Because that is my wont.”

He nods and then stops and bursts out laughing. “The dragon!”

Ah, it is them. My intuition still has its game on.  And my dragon lives, if only in the tales of babes.

* The title of this post is from a poem by James Kavanaugh, “Sunshine Days and Foggy Nights.”  Here’s a snippet:

I was born to catch dragons in their dens
And pick flowers
To tell tales and to laugh away the morning
To drift and dream like a lazy stream
And walk barefoot across sunshine days.

beast at the museum