We have just spent a fabulous 2 full days and 2 half days with Mia and Charlie here in Montpellier. For those of you who don’t already know, Mia is the younger of my two amazing step-daughters and Charlie (or Charlotte as she currently prefers) is our grand-daughter. We hadn’t seen Mia since she and Will, in typically adventurous and courageous fashion, hired a big van in the UK and moved our ‘stuff’, all of it, to Montpellier from Rochdale. That was in early July last year so seeing Mia again was a delight. As for Charlie, sorry – Charlotte, it had been even longer and she is growing up so quickly. Will, busy as ever, has a fortnight of gigs in Spain so couldn’t make it this time but we will make a special effort to get together just as soon as we can. Missed you Will :-/
The girlies arrived ahead of schedule on Monday afternoon and we were there to meet them at the airport – all excited with legs of jelly and stomachs full of cabbage whites and painted ladies all vying for the same air space.
I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow of the entire visit – we had a glorious time but you had to be there. The essence, however, of spending 2 full days and 2 half days with a 7-year old you haven’t seen for over 12 months is worth the telling.
I spent the whole of that time off-world in a place long since forgotten. In a child-like universe of uninhibited imagination where thoughts and ideas sprout wings unbidden. Why do most of us lose that when we grow up? What is it about the adult world that leads us to believe that there is something wrong, something distasteful about breaking or ignoring the rules of language, physics, and logic? It was all too brief a stay in the land of unicorns and universal understanding but a treasured one.
Carl Sagan once said that we are all made of star stuff. It is a simple but profound thought. And it seems to me that star stuff fuels our children’s dreams. We owe it to ourselves (don’t we?) to ask what lessons we can learn from that.
