As a kid, I believed I could save Tinker Bell’s life by clapping. I tried it during a televised live broadcast of Peter Pan, and it worked. I’ll never forget the tingling sensation at the back of my neck when I clapped my hands in our den on Long Island, and she revived onscreen.
When my Sunday school teacher taught us the song “Jesus Loves Me,” I believed every word and enjoyed the positive feedback.
When I pledged "allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for Richard Sands,” I believed he must have been one of my country's founding fathers.
Five nights a week, my tired commuter dad descended from a sooty Long Island Railroad train out of New York City. My mother taught me a bedtime prayer, which included a request that God “deliver us not into Penn Station." This prayer made sense.
Some beliefs involved nuance. The fine print about believing in Santa Claus meant that I also had to believe he had some frightening means of tracking my behavior for 364 days and nights before deciding if I’d been good enough to get presents.
Did you, as I did, believe that a tiny fairy lifted your head, as heavy as a bowling ball, with one hand while she deposited money under your pillow and removed the tooth you'd put there with her other hand, all without waking you up? Sure you did. The appearance of cold, hard cash was all the proof one needed.
Proof also existed that an Easter bunny entered and left my parents' house once each spring to deposit a load of multi-colored eggs in the living room. Wasn't I standing there each year with a basket of evidence? In the excitement of the hunt, I never asked how the rabbit got in or why a rabbit laid chicken eggs.
I felt skeptical about some things, like how my father could find Jones Beach without a map. I remember leaning forward from the back seat of the station wagon to ask him about it. “But Daddy, how do you know where it is?”
“I just do,” he said. Dad believed in knowing without any training delays. And he did play the piano by ear. When he gave me a bike, he believed I'd know how to pedal it. One surprise push downhill made me believe that not all adults are gifted teachers.
There are moments when faith fails us. Before I believed I'd ever climb the apple tree in my friend’s yard, I watched her climb.
“Come on!” she’d say. "It's easy."
“I can’t do it,” I answered day after day. It took weeks, but once I believed I could reach the first branch, I was up there, believing there'd be a way down.
I was twelve when two scary-looking Secret Service agents pulled me out of the House of Representatives gallery to ask why I’d taken my camera inside and snapped a photo of my congressperson. Worse still, they demanded that I tell them my zip code, which I didn't know. That day, I began to believe in reading posted signs and always carrying my address.
My last belief before leaving college was that I could audition and get the lead in my senior class musical. Believe me: I still treasure that Playbill!
Most of us sloughed off childish beliefs once we were on our own and independent. I traded mine for one new one: faith that if I held on to whatever job I had, it would pay for my rent and health insurance. Recalling a James Thurber cartoon, I began identifying with the father who tells his child, “Well, I’m disenchanted, too. We’re all disenchanted.”
In retirement, however, I’ve reaffirmed my faith in the unlikely. Yesterday, I got a preview of my friend Mike Rigg's soon-to-be-released mystery novel, Voices of the Elysian Fields. When he and I met at a writing conference six years ago, we dreamt of finishing and publishing a 2,000-word story. I'd joined a friendly critique group but was so self-conscious that I refused to read them my work. I told myself that maybe in a month or two, just as I'd eventually climbed that apple tree, a day would come when I'd get up and just get it over with. And that day came. After watching Mike edit his book for a year, my newest belief is that a day will come when I, too, am eager to revise.
What belief would benefit you this year?
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