The Grandpa's hat
"Marry your books and give birth to success"... That was my paternal grandfather's favorite phrase, great writer but absent father. His only interest in life was to produce fantasy worlds that trap the reader and imprison him. He amassed a fortune, but neglected the most precious thing a person has, his family.
However, he never saw the damage he caused his family with his detachment from real affections, but with me he was different.
I still remember how easily I got into his stories, as a child. He told me: "pay attention to creation, it has a life of its own, but you can tame it and make it your own way. It is fascinating to be the god in an uncreated world. Only those who have the gift will be able to bring out the real life, not this illusion that we live.
"So, you, me, dad or mom aren't real, grandpa,?" - I would ask him with my imagination on the verge of a collapse, feeling at times that everything I believed in at the age of ten was crumbling and wrapped in the fog of a fiction recreated by the skillful mind of my grandfather, which made me fly, in skies outside this world, swim, in the waters of the center of the earth, excavate ancient relics, penetrate mysterious caves, see wonders in the unknown.
"We are real, what is illusory is what we see, every world is a mystery, every fantasy is a dream to be awakened and our job is to shake them to open their eyes and see us"
"My mother tells me to take advantage of all your teachings, that you have a prodigious mind, but that I should learn to differentiate reality from fantasy."
"Oh, she's great, we're great, I'm great. We moved into the house, you know... We moved into the house, you know, but not for the reasons they think. I don't feel old or tired. I wanted to buy this big house for everyone, thinking of you more than them. I want you to develop the gene you inherited that's superior to mine and it's time for you to open up to it and flow."
"What is a gene, grandpa?"
"A gene is a unit of hereditary information that determines characteristics that are passed on in living things from generation to generation."
"I don't understand."
"The information of all that we are as a human species is being accumulated in the DNA chain. All living things have their own DNA network. DNA contains genes: the color of people's hair and eyes, gestures, some mental processes, and even the shape of teeth are determined by genes. Each inherits from parents, grandparents, great-grandparents a load of general and family-specific information, nourishes it and then passes it on to the descendants. Our family has bequeathed to us a gift of recreating old and new forms of life in writing, even unveiling some mysteries by sharpening our intuition".
"So, we as people are just a collection of information coming down from parents to children... The good, the bad, the successes, the mistakes... Is that already preestablished?"
"Mmmmm... Sharp and perhaps controversial perception. But, it's something like that. And in your case there is a genetic concordance with me that we must feed, nurture and exploit so that it continues to expand and manifest itself with greater strength and expressiveness in your descendants."
"For example, that nasty habit of putting your the tooth floss on the floor and then putting it back in your mouth is an inherited bad habit."
"Really? I thought that was a very genuine oversight on my part!"
"Hahaha... Just kidding! Of course it's a bad habit of yours... Do you know how many bacteria can be lurking around to colonize your body?"
"Oh, grandpa that's disgusting...Right now, I'm imagining an armed invasion of bacteria with a commander in charge shouting out loud: "Advance! Advance! Take advantage of the open channel! Join in! One, two, one, two, one, two! But also my defenses, building a retaining wall: 'All for one and one for all'."
"D'Artagnan to the rescue with his musketeers?" Hahaha... And what good would it be if those loyal knights entered battle without the armor of a good mouthwash?"
"Right! Attack!" And I ran to the bathroom to disinfect my mouth with my four musketeers holding the invasion in my mouth. Meanwhile, grandpa just laughed and said: "I haven't experienced this since my days as a child when I could see so easily the elephant hidden in the hat in the book of the "Little Prince" and I didn't understand how it was necessary to explain to the adults that that hat was not a simple hat, that it was a hiding place for dreams of childs."
17/05/2020
In response to @mariannewest in Weekend Freewrite - 5/16/2020 - Part 1 - The First SentencePrompts are highlighted in bold.
