There was a time, long ago, when Thing had been at his happiest. In those days he would sit at the cave entrance watching, tasting and listening to all the world and what it could offer. Inside the cave his parents would be peacefully sitting, talking to each other. It was the best of times, as someone once said.
One warm summer’s evening he heard a tune drift up from the town below, it was one that he had heard several times before. It appeared to be a favorite of the girl who lived in the farm that sat on top of the lavender field. It was a song by an English band, the song was called ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’.
Thing had wondered what the song was about. How could a dream home be a place of sadness? Wasn’t his home, his cave, a place of love, a place to feel safe - a place to return to at the end of the day?
But that was in the days when Thing took his family life for granted. That was in the days before his mother took sick, before his father took her to a hospital and said they would return. They still hadn’t, and now he sat waiting on them.
Now he understood what the song meant.
Yet in those days of waiting, Thing had grown both in stature and inside himself. He had realized one particular, important point. It wasn’t his mother’s fault she had grown sick. It probably wasn’t even his father’s fault that he hadn’t returned home. The kids in the town, and in the school, who had bullied him, who had called him names – it wasn’t those children who were the problem. It was life.
Thing had come to realize that we all fought each other over the pettiest and grandest of problems, yet wasn’t it life who had ganged up on us, set us against each other and stood back and watched?
Thing hadn’t asked to look different from the other kids in school. The kids in school hadn’t asked for parents who taught them to be intolerant of differences. Yet here we all were, blaming each other for everything and in the background life was giggling behind a door.
Thing realized you couldn’t beat life – for in the end when life grew bored with you, it wore you down and pushed you aside. But, and this was where he was beginning to mature, you could win little victories in every minute of every day by smiling back in life’s face and saying ‘is that all you’ve got?’.
But life could only do one thing and that was to try and destroy your dream home. Thing was appreciating that you could build and re-build your dreams, again, and again, and again. All it had to be was one more than life’s attempts.
Sure life would take another shot at you, but if we all realized that no one got off without some heartache in their home - then maybe this would lead to us all appreciating each other a little better and finally seeing that there was only one common enemy – life, itself.
Thing yawned and finally called it a night. Thing headed to the back of the cave humming the tune to that English band’s song – and smiling to himself – knowing that tomorrow, he would think of another way to build a new dream home.
bobby stevenson 2015
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