Dream a Little Dream of Me

When my father celebrated his 90th birthday, someone asked him the secret to a long life. After a short pause, he replied with a cliché, “Don’t worry about the small stuff.” He stopped a minute and winked, finishing the punch line, “And, you know, it’s all small stuff.”

In my opinion, my father was fascinated by anything small. Small things captured his curiosity. One summer he collected little bits of lichen, identifying each species. He constructed shadow boxes for each sample and hand-wrote the labels with the common name as well as the Latin name. Cladonia rangiferina, also known as Reindeer Moss, was like the manna from heaven, Dad told me. It could turn air, light and moisture into food.

Far from worrying about small stuff, he was intrigued by it. He constructed a dollhouse for me. For each room he meticulously crafted wooden furniture: stoves and refrigerators in the kitchen, bunk beds and swinging cribs for the children’s bedrooms, cabinets and bookcases for the living room. For the bookcase he made and hand painted books out of slivers, scribbling titles on the tiny spines. Dad had as much fun designing and building that little house as the children who played with it.

My friends and I played with that dollhouse for years, imagining the dwarfs who lived inside. We made small rugs, bedspreads and curtains for the windows. The boys insisted that they were not playing but simply rearranging the furniture. However, they were as transfixed by the house as the girls.

In the past few weeks I have watched as the fireflies wink and sparkle between the trees after sundown. It seems to me that by paying homage to the small stuff in life I can let go of worrying about it.