Fairies

“Grandpa, do you believe in fairies?”

My granddaughter, Kate, was sitting next to me on the couch. We had just finished watching the movie, Fairy Tale, a True Story.

“Well, ah, do I believe in fairies? Let’s see.”

I thought hard about this, knowing that she wanted to believe in them as much as I wanted to believe in Peter Pan and Neverland when I was her age. Why, I fantasized about Peter, the lost boys, and Hook until I was about, well, I still do.

“I had a fairy once. Didn’t I tell you? Her name was Jackie.”

“You had a fairy named Jackie?”

Actually, the name we had given her was Fat Jackie, but I wasn’t going to tell Kate that.

“Yes, Jackie was my car dash fairy. She had a wand and a tiara in her hair and her head bobbled back and forth. To keep her from sliding off the dash, she had a big butt, erm, bottom, filled with sand. She perhaps had the biggest bottom in all the fairy world.”

“What did she do, Papa? Did she turn your car into a carriage?”

“No, no, it was still a Vega. You see Kate, boys don’t like carriages. They want hot cars but changing the Vega into a hot car was beyond her magical powers. She told me that driving it was the burden I would have to bear, that I must face many humiliations ahead.”

“Did Jackie give you any money when you lost a tooth?”

“Jackie wouldn’t even give me money for the parking meter. She was funny that way. What she did do was let me borrow her wand.”

“Did you do magical things?”

“I magically got an annoying piece of meat unstuck between my molars with it, but mostly I used it for stirring my coffee.”

“Fairies are supposed to be useful, Papa.”

“Well, I’m not saying she wasn’t useful. You see, back in the days of old, we didn’t have phones with GPSs on them. We had to use a large, folded piece of paper called, “A Map.” Now, you can just imagine how awkward it would be to have this large piece of paper opened and trying to follow its directions while you are also driving. That is where I let Jackie guide me.”

“You see, I would watch her bobble head. If it bobbled up and down, we were to go straight. If it bobbled to the right or left, she was telling me to turn that direction. Jackie was fairly accurate until the shocks on the Vega went bad and then her head bobbled every which direction. I would yell, ‘Pull it together girl, we’re coming to an intersection!’ Jackie was a good dash fairy.”

“What happened to her, Papa?”

“Fairies don’t stay around forever. Sometimes you must set them free. My best friend, Chuck, was riding in the car with me. He started making fun of Jackie.”

“Real men don’t have dash fairies in their cars,” he said. “It’s bad enough that we are being seen in a Vega.”

“He grabbed Jackie, rolled down his window and set her free. I looked through the rear-view mirror and saw her big fat butt…excuse me, bottom, bouncing down the freeway. That was the last time I saw her. Perhaps, she lives on the dash of another car now. Maybe even a Volkswagen.”

Katelyn stared at me for a long moment. “That’s a sad story Papa. I don’t believe in fairies.”

I wish she had said that at the start. I used up about a week’s worth of creativity on that one.

*The Title Photo is of Frances and the 1917 Cottingley Fairies*

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