S'il vous plâit...dessine moi un mouton.
Ever since a twenty-something birthday, years ago, when I was gifted the above image in ready-to-hang, hard-backed laminated form, it's never lived far from where I write. I think most people are familiar with Le Petit Prince, but his story is something I always come back to, especially at times when my life is most without definition. He is a child who talks to adults because they appear so lost in the world and confused about what's important, and yet who is himself so full of questions.
As my life unfolds in Pleasant Valley I feel at times that I've found myself on alien soil. The brash and dirty, but overwhelmingly full and attractive urban milieu of Toronto became the norm, and was in a lot of ways where I grew up and formed the most important parts of myself. I understand Subway etiquette inside out - don't look at anyone, don't smile unless smiled to, don't worry about the crazy people, do wear headphones - and the breakneck pace of pedestrians, the way everyone looks "busy," like they're late for something far too important to be explained, and the unqualified existence of artists, profiteers, street people, students, old monied families, social activists, politicians and the incredible multicultural cross-sections: these things are normal.
In Pleasant Valley things are slower, to be sure. But there is something else that tugs at my thoughts.
Le Petit Prince spends most of his life alone on an asteroid, with only a rose to care for, and ashy volcanoes to clean. Because the rose is his only companion he loves her as a person loves the thing that is most precious and unique in their life. It is only after his travels, when he stumbles upon a bush of roses, that he realizes the truth: the object of his deepest and truest, complete and unending love is not unique. The rose, playing up her status as his only love, is cruel to her child-keeper, making him feel beneath her, while appeasing him with her beauty. She is prone to fits of jelousy, and when the Prince leaves she makes a sad plea for him to stay, telling him of all the dangers that would surely be her demise were he ever to go. Her last confused love is fanned by guilt - to keep him she must hurt him. But finally, when it is clear he means to leave, she weakly wishes him to go and "be happy." As he is carried away by a passing flock of birds she quietly turns away so he cannot see her tears.
It is in this way that the Prince begins his journey, following a path shaped like a question mark, having left his first love behind in search of something else.
His first lesson in love, and in the measure of other people, is that that deeds, not words, mean something. So I, in my voyage back to Pleasant Valley, am trying to take this lesson to heart. Doing things, not simply watching them, will make this place my new normal. I'm not saying Toronto is a rose, or anything so hokey and obvious. But something in the story of Le Petit Prince points to a feeling much harder to put into words, or at least to say better than Saint Exupery has already done.
Maybe all this rose-fixation comes from the evening's still lingering aftertaste of Spring's first flush. Tonight I feel more deeply moved by my new surroundings, prone to contemplation, and full of anticipation for...
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