Once Upon a Bubble

Recently as I was driving home from the hospital and the experience of standing at bedside of a young person who had been given no hope for survival, a humongous bubble floated across Rt. 15 right in front of me--just one.  I immediately remembered a story my father told me when I was a preschooler (yes, I do remember).  I'm sure he had just tucked me into bed (must have been his turn), heard my prayers and answered all manner of the bedtime questions asked for the purpose of stalling that makes a parent wonder how close he (in this case) is to the fine line existing between exhaustion and insanity.  My memory envisions him kissing me goodnight, laying his hand on the doorknob and then his posture going all slack when I asked for a story (and that last image I know very well from my own experience with preschoolers and bedtime).

Either he didn't yet know much about mediating Bible stories to a 3-year-old or he had exhausted the appropriate ones for the sheer number he had to tell--at least one each night would have required somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 by this time; his fairy tale repertory was limited to "The Three Bears," "The Three Little Pigs" and a terrifying story-song about a dragon with 13 tails who fed with greed "on little boy's puppy dogs* and big fat snails"--a song he loved to sing to us ONLY at bedtime.  Perhaps he shares some responsibility for the fact that I was a child insomniac.

But this night he must have been eager to get on with his evening because, though he granted my request, he didn't sing the song or default to the other two stories.  He told a new one.  It went like this:

"Once upon a time there was a bubble, and this bubble grew to be a big bubble.  And he grew bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until he was quite pleased and said to himself, 'Oh, I must be the most beautiful bubble in the whole world!'  And then-- he popped!  The end!  Goodnight!"

And in a flash Dad was gone.  His rapid departure was as disappointing as his shockingly abrupt ending to the story.  The truth is, a child asks for a story mainly to have the presence of her parent, right?  Why else would she endure the lions and tigers and wolves and dragons that enter so many childhood stories--at least in the stories people liked to tell me. After he left the room I have no doubt that I lay awake like I did every night,  and my young, insomniac self was left to think about that very, very, VERY short story--a story that left me with questions longer than the story itself:

Did this bubble have a name?
Was there a mother bubble? Was she sad when her son bubble didn't come home?
And was the bubble wrong to get big or to think he was beautiful?
Was popping a punishment or simply the natural end, since all bubbles eventually pop?
And if the bubble was punished, was it for getting big or for thinking he was the most beautiful?

Did it hurt when he popped?

Did the popping make him dead?
Can bubbles really think?
If they do, with what are they thinking?
If bubbles truly can think, was there really enough time for the bubble to think about how beautiful he was before he popped?  And wouldn't he have had to compare himself to other bubbles to even know if he was most beautiful, requiring much time and reflection?
Where did the bubble go after he popped?

Of course that "story"--and I guess it can pass for a story** as it is no shorter than many Jesus told--had a deeper meaning than my three-year-old self could recognize: the story could have imaged the fall of the devil which I probably should have realized since I had already begun to blame him for most things I got in trouble for; the bubble could have represented pride--like the pride of the rich man who tore down his barns to make bigger ones in which to store his bumper crops; it could in fact be the story of the rise and fall of many throughout history.  In any case, it is, at least in part, a story about all of us.

The beautiful, gigantic bubble that wafted over the highway last Saturday as I drove home from the hospital was a very timely reminder and image of the brevity of our precious lives.  "Here today and gone tomorrow" is one way of saying it; "all flesh is grass" is another; today I remember a brief yarn my dad spun half a century ago and realize that it's brevity exemplifies more than the story.



*"The Green-eyed Dragon" is the name of the song my dad loved to sing to us and I'm not sure, because I only heard him sing it and never saw a written representation, if the dragon ate "little boy's puppy dogs and big fat snails," or "little boys, puppy dogs and big fat snails."  In this story, a comma makes a big difference; and should the dragon eat the little boys and not just their puppies, I was always (and still am) glad to be a girl.

**According to Aristotle, for a story to be a story, it must have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Dad's story had all three, but absolutely nothing more.  As if a skeleton could call itself a human being.