Three months before our second son, Sam, was born, we moved Spencer out of the crib and across the hall to a big-boy bed. We’d read that a psychologist told parents not to move one child out of a crib the very day a new baby was put in it. It might cause the older child to resent the younger one. It was all for naught. When we brought baby Sam home, Spencer took one look at him, pointed at my wife’s stomach, and said, “Put him back.“

    When we moved him to his twin-size bed, I got in the habit of lying beside Spencer to tell him a bedtime story. I always tell him about Zipper. Zipper was my dog growing up. We got her when I was a baby. She died a week before I left home at the age of nineteen. After Zipper was gone, I didn’t see much point in sticking around.

    I tell Spencer how Zipper went fishing with me, how she jumped in the lake to catch a fish that was getting away because she knew times were hard. I told him about the time Zipper and I went camping and how, when we woke up, a deer was sleeping right beside us. None of those things really happened, but they were bedtime stories my father had told me about his dog Zipper, so I’m honor-bound to pass them down the family line.

    In the years I’ve been telling Spencer bedtime stories, I’ve added a few stories of my own. I tell him how Zipper pulled me from a raging river. Or about the time Zipper bit a charging bull on the nose and saved my life. After I tell him a story, he is full of questions. “How deep was the river? How hard did Zipper bite the bull?” At the age of four, he accepts as gospel truth all I tell him. ‘When he no longer believes me, something precious will be lost. Though I welcome his growth, I do not look forward to that day.

    We keep our stereo in his bedroom, high on a shelf, away from little Sam fingers. It is a complicated stereo, one of our few concessions to technological modernity and far too perplexing for Joan and me to figure out. Four-year-old Spencer has it down pat.

...he accepts as gospel truth all I tell him.

    When I’m finished telling him about Zipper, Spencer climbs out of bed, runs to the stereo, and plays the Nat King Cole Christmas CD. (I have to remind myself that they’re not called records anymore.) Spencer is a serious Nat King Cole fan. He especially likes “Deck the Halls,” “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” and “Joy to the World!” He programs the CD player to perform them in that order. When Spencer is tired, he’ll be asleep before Mr. Cole starts tolling the ancient yuletide carol.

    My son has little regard for the seasons of music. To his ear, the herald angels sound every bit as good in July as in December. My wife and I sit in our front room on a warm July evening, the windows open, nursing a glass of lemonade, while Nat King Cole sings of peace on earth and mercy mild. It is a fine message, one that bears repeating regardless of season.

    The thing I love most about my children is their high regard for the wondrous. Theirs is a world where deer and daddies slumber in peaceful coexistence, where angel bands crowd a meager manger, and life’s gravest dangers are bested by a twenty-pound dog with ringworm. There is no incongruity in their world, no jarring clash between fact and fable. All is truth, for now.

    But the day will come when things will cease to be true just because Daddy said so. “Is that really true?” will creep into their language. How will we answer our children? Will we tell them that herald angels still sing their advent song? Or that peace on earth and mercy mild are infinitely harder to program than a CD player?

    I have friends who tell their toddler son the brutal truth about Santa. I pity the child whose parents so thoroughly rob him of wonder, just as I pity the adult whose cynicism kills the steady beat of an angel’s wing. As for me, I believe in what Nat King Cole sings — from herald angels to peace on earth. For truth, like any object of beauty, has many facets. While some things are Zipper-true, others are gospel-true. And each truth has its beauty.

From the book Front Porch Tales, by Philip Gulley. © 1997 by Multnomah Pub., used by permission.

Title: "Bedtime Stories"
Author: Philip Gulley
Publication Date: July 5, 2001

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