For each and every one of us, Time is an indescribably patient artist, painting and repainting a portrait of us, over the very same canvas, year after passing year. Our tiny innocent features give way to strokes of middle age, and the Artist forever dabs with deeper grays the living palette that paints our lives. Only something dimly familiar sparkles yet in our eyes, the last bastion of youth’s first charge.
A waning weakness in me now, glowed brightly when I was five, the inculpable desire to put a smile wherever a smile was not. And my first year of school, Kindergarten’s passage, brought into my young life the first true opportunities to do so.
The memory begins with leaving my new classroom, on what in a child’s eyes was almost a quest, to circumnavigate the globe of hallways that formed my world, and reach the here-be-dragons office where the Principal reigned over his domain. The mission I was on has been lost to Time, but the events have not. And as I wandered slowly, meanderingly down the hallways, I passed the one door that remained open. I peered inside. A gaggle of bored, sleepy-eyed youngsters sat woefully pondering the words of an unseen lecturer. I stopped for a moment and watched through the open doorway. And all at once my heart could not bear to see others suffer when I had the power to break that joyless spell. And so I struck a pose with outstretched hand, and bellowed as loud as I could, “Hi all you kids out there in TV land!”.
The fracas ensued immediately – a tiny would-be Samaritan that was me took off like a shot, chased by one, then two, then three teachers, whilst a classroom of liberated children laughed riotously.
Moments later I found myself where I had intended to go anyway, the lair of the much feared schoolmaster. Words were the only paddle inflicted on me, as I relearned that innocence must never give discipline a merry chase. And my chastised eyes spent most of their gaze out the window behind him, and the lovely world I would rather be enjoying, as I imagined did my intended newfound friends.
Months later, plastered on nearly every post in our schoolyard, were pictures of that selfsame principal, with the unknown word “Bigamist” beneath it. A visit home and a query to my Mom led to its definition, and I suddenly found myself feeling just as sorry for him as I had for myself, imagining him standing before some adult kind of Principal and wishing, just like me, he could just be outside on this beautiful day.
We tried so hard, in our childish sort of way, to breathe new life into the show we love so dearly, and wake the audience world from the lecture of how its day has passed, so they could see how young it really is. To be young while you are young (if only in your heart), reliving youth’s sights and sounds, characters and themes, magic and song, by continuing its epic journey and not giving up and starting over. But BSG is now torn, between what it could be and what it is, and we long-time fans sent head down to the office of reality.
Yes, I could have thought what irony that the one who chastised me in my youth was at that moment breaking a far greater rule, but I chose instead to feel how much we were the same, both guilty of loving too much.
I am still waiting to play outside, in the fields where Galactica fond and familiar, leads a rag tag fugitive fleet, on a lonely quest, to a shining planet known as…
Mirth…
Affectionately and respectfully,
Muffit
The Tiny Samaritan and BSG
!!
