The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [42]
Honeymouth heard the insult and couldn’t stifle his compulsive urge to talk. He seconded the dreamseller:
“Listen, pal, I’m not a ‘doctorate’ of anything,” he told the professor. “But let your children be immersed in nature. Let them play and get dirty. That way, none of them will turn out to be a crazy, no-good drunk like me.” He made a gesture, asking for patience and added, “But I’m getting better, chief.”
He turned to the children and said, “Anybody who wants to fly like a butterfly, raise your hand.”
Three children raised their hands, two remained indifferent and three hid behind their parents and answered, “I’m afraid of butterflies.”
Offended by the forwardness of the strangers, several parents called the security guards at the entrance to the large Megasoft department store they were about to enter. The guards quickly ushered us out.
“Get out of here, you bums.”
But, before leaving, the dreamseller turned to the parents who had argued with him and said, “I ask your forgiveness for my actions and hope that one day you won’t have to ask your children’s forgiveness for yours.”
For some of the parents, the dreamseller’s ideas didn’t fall on barren ground. Some, even while angry, began to realize they needed to work on their relationship with their children. Their children had received the best possible educations under the existing system; they had become experts in consuming products and using computers, but they were perpetually dissatisfied. They didn’t know how to observe, feel and draw conclusions. These parents realized that nature may not be as important to the mental survival of the human race as it was to its emotional survival. They began to frequent forests, zoos and urban gardens.
Nature is a more invaluable teacher than all the other educational theories for expanding the mind’s horizons.
I was moved at seeing the dreamseller’s and Bartholomew’s tenderness with children. I had never thought too much about them. I was too busy criticizing society in the classroom. I didn’t understand that the true educational material was the student and not the information. I was only concerned that they keep quiet and pay attention in class.
That same afternoon, we passed through a residential district. We came upon a large, gloomy building. The garden was overgrown with tall grass. Enormous trees cast looming shadows, preventing the low plants from flourishing. The old building with its arches was beautiful, but its paint had faded. The wooden window frames were rotting and seemed painted in the green moss. Plaster was peeling from the filthy white walls. It was a nursing home, but definitely not a pleasant place to live out the last years of one’s life.
Many elderly people went there not because their families had abandoned them, but simply because they had no close relatives. The majority of those residents had only one child or at most two. When an only child died or moved to a different city or couldn’t physically or financially care for his aging parents, the elderly were sent to these institutions for their medical and daily care. They fled from the suffocating trap of loneliness to these nursing homes.
Looking at the building, the dreamseller told us, “Behold a good setting for dreams. Go and bring joy to the people who live there.”
In our “holy” prejudice we thought, “Dreams? In a nursing home? Those people are bored and depressed. What could possibly excite them anymore?” We had been in the world of children, and now we were entering the world of the elderly. Worlds so far apart yet so alike. The problem was that the dreamseller took a step back. We were waiting for him to at least guide us with some instruction, but he simply said he was going for a walk. Before the dreamseller left, Dimas, who began stuttering and blinking uncontrollably, expressed his uncertainty:
“Make . . . the . . . the old folks hap . . . happy? How, dreamseller? They ha . . . have one foot in the grave.” He knew how to pick old people’s pockets, how to worry them half to death, but he had never