The Forgotten Door 

When I was in third or fourth grade, I acquired a book called The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key.  I suspect I still have it somewhere. It spoke to me then and has continued to over the years, although I haven't thought about it recently. Amazingly, it is still on Amazon, with the same cover, although I probably spent $.50 on it, and now it is closer to $5.  That, by the way, was back when ¢ signs were common! 7¢ would buy a still-warm glazed donut at the bakeshop above the library and 25¢ weekly was a proper allowance for a fourth-grader.

But I'm going off on tangents.  (Who, me?)  Briefly, the story is about a boy from another planet who falls through a long-closed portal between his world and Earth and ends up in the mountains with amnesia.  He eventually meets, befriends, and is taken in by a local family.  When local superstition makes his presence and that of the family who harbors him untenable, they escape back to his magical planet where the people come out at night to look at the stars.  "Even the deer come out to watch unafraid."

As a child, I never felt I fit in, not with the kids around me, not with my family, only, perhaps with the animals. This story was a wonderful fantasy, a beacon of hope that my child's mind could comprehend and latch on to.  Although I've made my place in this world and in several virtual worlds, the story still intrigues me.  Although there were different reasons to feel afraid when I was ten then there are now, fear is certainly a part of everyday life. Ukraine is being invaded by Putin, there's plastic in our drinking water, our ecosystem is in grave danger from global warming, etc.  Escaping to a place where one can even *see* the stars sounds good to me.

Hopefully, the deer don't have COVID there!

As a child, I had a recurring dream where I crawled through a very small doorway to a hidden attic lined wall-to-wall with books. It was my safe place, my dreaming space. I had that dream for years and still remember it vividly. It went away as I grew older and was able to make more logical sense of the problems in my world and learn how I could fix some of the more personal ones. I eventually either became unable to find the door or could no longer fit through it.

The other recurring dream I remember having was in a long hallway or tunnel, something like the corridors with escalators in airports.  Always, everyone else was going towards the light and I was going inward, downward. I think this dream was more troubling to me, unlike the dream about my hidden attic.

The world makes more logical sense at age 66 than it did at age ten, although some parts are unfathomable, like the existence of Putin or Trump.  There was a lot to like about that long-ago child. Sometimes I miss her.