Rewinding some twenty odd years, we visit Mr. Davidson’s grade five class. He was a smidge eccentric with his wild tufts of reddish-orange hair, tinged slightly with white, and somehow managed to keep a seemingly endless supply of various dried fruit (papaya, pineapple, ginger) in his top drawer as a reward to well-behaved students. During our year with him, we studied, hatched and raised birds (chicken and quail) in a classroom that smelled unmistakably like a barnyard.
Focused on the arts, he assigned us graphic collages to create and spiral-graph designs to color, each of which he would proudly laminate and frame for us. Beyond that, we were required to write an autobiography of our truly fictional future lives.
At ten years old, I wrote of my sprawling estate, luxury automobiles and celebrity husband (namely, Tom Selleck, who fathered our four beautiful children; two boys, two girls). While his acting career continued to keep us in the lifestyle that we had grown accustomed to, I produced literature worthy of deep sighs, a few tears and a smiley-finish.
The imagination of a child is a truly marvelous thing… and, sometimes, if we look hard enough, we can find truth in fiction. It’s just too bad that Tom Selleck was already married!