“Once upon a time…”
The magical dog, Merlin!
Blog 58
This blog is taken from my book Theatre Is My Life! Thoughts on Play Quotes: A book of meditations for each day of the year. So I originally wrote this piece 11 years ago. Yesterday, my granddaughter Emmeline turned 16.
“Moonlight and a gentle, misty veil.
The perfect setting for a fairytale.
Here, for an hour, you and I will climb
The silken threads of ‘Once upon a time’...”
Narrator in Michael Elliot Brill’s The Masque of Beauty and the Beast
In Hebrew, the phrase is “Hayoh hayah pa'am...” in French, “Il était une fois...” in modern Greek “Mia fora ki enan kairo...” in Welsh “Amser maith yn ôl...” “Once upon a time,” those magic opening words of works by the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and all of our grandmothers. These words foretell an anecdote that comes from oral folk tales, an escapade from literary geniuses, or an exploit from our own family history.
My granddaughter Emmeline, who just turned five yesterday, loves to hear stories of the great dog Merlin. He was the precious Springer Spaniel we welcomed into our home when my son Seth wanted to add a canine family member. Merlin’s life with us spanned from the day Seth turned 11 until Emmeline was almost a year and a half — over 15 years. Emmeline can remember him a tiny bit. Photographs help, but the stories bring him back to vivid life every time we begin, “Once upon a time...” With such an awe-inspiring wizardly name, Merlin was bound to be the center of a number of escapades.
Merlin somehow snagged three hotdogs out of a hot pan on the back burner of the stove. Merlin somehow jumped up on a fully set table to look out the kitchen window without breaking a single Christmas plate. Merlin somehow found and neatly folded two towels and a blanket onto the cold slate floor to make himself a warm bed when left home by himself one night.
Merlin learned a little twirling dance he did to welcome us home every evening. Merlin discovered how to fly by running very fast at the top of the lawn and then jumping up in the air just as the yard sloped downward. Merlin once made a turtle run about 10 miles an hour. Merlin loved to put a string of Indian ankle bells around his neck at Christmas time.
We have Merlin narratives for each holiday, and for every plain old day as well. Emmeline loves the dog tales best, but also enjoys hearing family stories about when I was young, when her mother was little, when my mother and my grandmother were babes, what happened last Christmas, last beach trip, the time the tornado blew the attic door ajar, the time Hurricane Opal came up the power line right-of-way and destroyed the trees in my backyard.
I have read that children whose families chat daily about what they have done and who recall ancestral history can form stronger concepts of themselves and how they fit into the world, develop heartier characters, deal better with common situations, and even have less trouble with melancholy and stress. I simply began telling tribal tales because my mother and grandmother did, and I loved to hear the same anecdotes over and over and over again — and rightly thought Emmeline would, too. “Once upon a time...” “Der var engang...” “Noong unang panahon…”