The Wishing Shell

On the bottom shelf of the bookcase in my room I have this box of shells that I collected on beaches in Africa and Europe years ago. It is a wooden box with a hinged glass top. Recently Luke discovered it and pulled out a beautiful cone-shaped shell and asked if he could have it. I told him it was a magic shell and that if you made a wish to the shell it would be granted. He thought about it and then wished for a minivan (he's been obsessed with getting a minivan for almost a year). When the ceiling didn't slide open revealing a Honda Odyssey ready to drop into the room, he looked pretty disappointed. I told him he just had to wait for his wish to come true. Then he told me to make a wish on the shell. I held it reverently and said, "I wish someone was hugging me." Luke jumped into my lap and gave me a big hug, and I exclaimed, "My wish came true!"

Then a couple of days ago, we were all in bed together waking up, and Luke went over the bookcase and got the wishing shell. This time he wished for a "real" monkey as a pet. He gave the wishing shell to me again, and I wished for a kiss on the cheek. Luke gave his Mama a conspiratorial look and they both gave me a kiss.

This morning Luke came into my bed when he woke up and we snuggled and played "I spy," one of his favorite games. Then he ran over to the bookcase and got the shell. He came back to the bed and lay down on his side with his naked back towards me and said, "I wish someone was rubbing my back." Of course I complied. Then he rolled over and dropped a plastic, yellow toy street sign he had been playing with in front of me. "I wish someone would give me a sign," he mused.

Am I fooling myself that maybe he's learned an important lesson about the magic of simple things, about the power in seeing the precious gifts we already have instead of those we don't? For a while it's worried me that, like me, he seems by nature to never be satisfied, to always be seeing in his mind's eye what could be and not what is. It's a way of looking at the world that has its benefits too; it's what makes me an effective school improvement leader, what drove me to refinish the bathroom last summer, what has helped me to be living this life that Tina and I imagined when we were twenty-one lying in her Kenmore square dorm room together. But at the same time it has its costs. We can't live in the world that could be, can't nourish our bodies and lay our heads down for rest there. Last spring I got Luke a Berenstain Bears book about counting your blessings, and since that time I've started playing a game with Luke called "Count our Blessings." We take turns counting something we're grateful for that happened in our day, usually going up to about ten. We did it in the car on the drive home from the zoo, in a farmer's field while we were picking blueberries with friends. I want Luke to be a visionary, someone who is always striving to make the world a better place, to be a better person himself, to push himself towards excellence in all that he does. I want him to understand that there is real magic in our wishes, that we are the authors of our lives and that infinite possibility is in the palm of our hand, as real as that shell. Is it unrealistic for me to hope that he will also be a person who can find serenity in simple things, who can be satisfied with what he has in the moment, who can feel the magic blessing in a perfectly ripe summer peach? Maybe. But it's in my nature to strive for that goal for him.