Thursday, May 09, 2013

The girl who saved the world

Clare had a dream that the world was ending because the sun was going out.

This is because, months ago, she got on this curiosity kick about all the different ways the world could end. For weeks, as we would drive to church on Sunday morning, she would pester me for yet another global catastrophe scenario.

I'm still not sure what that's all about, but I know my kid: evasion and deferral weren not options. So, in kid terms, we talked about mutually assured destruction and nuclear war, the statistical probability of a meteor plunging the earth into another I e age, the sun going nova, and the eventual heat death of the universe.

So when she told me this morning that she'd had a dream that the sun was going out and that everyone on earth was about to die, I wasn't surprised.

What was surprising, though, was the calm matter-of-factness of her manner. It was a scary dream, a bit, she said, because, you know, everybody and everything was about to die. But it was also a superhero dream where everything was right in the end.

"Who was the superhero?" I asked.

"All of us!" she answered, "but especially me! I saved everybody on the whole earth!"

That's my girl.

"How did you do that?" I asked, expecting some sort of fantastic flying around in space shenanigans of some sort.

"Well, instead of sitting around being really scared and sad that we were all gonna die, I said, let's get a big bunch of rocks and put them together into a giant rock-ball, and then dig down to the center of the earth and get some lava and pour the lava on it, the make a big rocket and tie it to the rocket and take it to where the sun should be. And so we all worked together and made it happen and THAT'S how we saved the whole earth!"

Sounds like she's actually been listening to my constant remonstrance: if you have a problem, don't just sit there--do something about it. Think of a solution. Take action!

That's my girl. One day she's gonna save the world.

1 comment:

The Good Tale said...
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