Sharing stories: Talking about past experiences with my son

“What other interesting stories do you have?” my son asked me while we were riding home one recent evening. I have never considered myself an interesting person. 

My life, as good as it is, is pretty routine and mundane, especially since becoming a parent. So, to answer his question, I had to think fast and dig deep in my memory to a time before school schedules and extracurricular activities dominated my calendar.

This conversation was prefaced by telling him about an encounter with a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Not a costumed superhero, but a literal man climbing around the roof of the building that holds the windowless dungeon that is my cubicle. A few of us confronted the stranger, who seemed innocent enough and was quite friendly as he talked while collecting debris and muck from the roof.

“I’m drawn to clogs. I can feel them,” he said. 

And sure enough, there was a clog in the gutter. When we stopped him from entering the building’s attic, he shimmied down the wall and swung to the sidewalk via a gas line. He disappeared down the street, never to be seen again.  

He was some kind of guru for sure, and we just let him walk away.

Back in the car with my son, I asked, “Have I ever told you about the Tibetan monks?”

I hadn’t. So, I shared this tale: About 15 years ago, a group of Tibetan monks visited Atlanta, which is home to the North American Drepung Loseling Monastery, sister Buddhist center of the monastery of the same name in India that houses the famed Dalai Lama and other monks, exiled from their homeland when Tibet was claimed by China. The monks brought along an exhibition of sacred relics, bone fragments, beads and scraps of cloth, remnants of past Lamas, some a thousand years old.

I covered the visit and exhibition for the newspaper I worked for. I met the monks and talked, via an interpreter, about their experiences and the effort to keep their culture alive. During the visit to the monastery to view the relics, I was given a container of holy water, water tinted yellow with saffron and blessed by the monks. I did not intend to participate in a religious ceremony outside of my own customs, but I certainly didn’t want to offend my hosts, so I accepted the vial and slipped it in my pocket. Later, back in my small apartment, I fed the sacred liquid to my pet bearded dragon.

To cut a long story short, that lizard defied conventions for captive bred reptiles and lived an extra-long life of about 17 years, two more than the high end of their life expectancy. I think it was the holy water. The lizard is buried on my property, at the edge of the woods under a sweetgum tree. My son said he remembers the funeral we had for it. I don’t doubt him.

“Did the holy water really make the lizard live longer?” he asked. He’s 12 years old now, and there is still a sliver of magic left in the world.

“I have no reason not to think that,” I answered, pulling the car under the garage.

Then the day went back to the regular and mundane, but for a brief moment I was able to relive a past experience with someone I hope has a lot of adventures to come.