We were on vacation in Alsace. In addition to an almost infinite amount of half-timbered houses in Nougat colors and powerful dough products full of cool cheese and salty ham, there was also an amusement park that was completely devoted to Le Petit Prince: the world-famous blonde prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
That book, from 1943 – in which an alien prince and a pilot meet in a desert and tells the Prinsje about his travels about all kinds of planets – has a special meaning in my life. It was there from my smallest small. It was already read to me when I didn’t get much of the wise criticism that the writer has on hull adults, but I did understand how important one specific rose – even though there are millions on earth – can be for those who love her.
And when a little boy from our family drowned in our back garden – I was eight, and I was there – the mystical prince, who was just here to return to his own planet, a definitive room in the torn heart of the family, and also in mine. His surprised look, that little body so lost in that desert: I wanted to keep it close to me. And so you can find something of him in all kinds of drawers and cupboards in my house. A bookmark, a doll, a children’s pajamas, a placemat, a Christmas tree hanger, a cap. He is there, he doesn’t leave.
So we go to that totally non -loaded amusement park. We walked – a son on each hand – the entrance and ran into a crater imps, with a lonely statue of the Prinsje in the middle. I turned around my axis. Lovered beef figures popped up everywhere: elephant, fox, sheep, rose, king, drunkard.
“Mama must of course cry now,” Willem announced with the children, while I already felt the juicy, thick tears, of the very exclusive ones you keep for special occasions, roll down my cheeks down.
“It’s going again,” I said after three minutes, soaked my neck and the board of my T-shirt.
It turned out to be a sweet park, full of patient and calm French audience and with somewhat clumsy attractions. There was a balloon with a round bar to sit on, pedals at your feet, pedaling and drinking and higher up the air. A merry-go-round, roller rinks, a virtual shooting experience on moving scooters, a whitewater course. Everything seemed generically purchased and then turned to the universe of Saint-Exupéry. I was sitting on such a scooter, he shook and shaked and I only thought of sorrow. How it sometimes flows and then hardened again, and how it benefits from soft and magical stories. But here, in this amusement park, it was also as if I was flooded. The comfort stared at me from all sides.
I was persuaded to go into the whitewater course. While I was raised, I wanted to leave. Back to the small relics in my house. I wanted to touch them and store them again.
But at the height, in the bend before we would dump down, I heard shouts. I looked aside. My sons in the ridge of a high climbing tower, with bare knees in shorts, happy – and a bit admiring – waving to their mother. Real, living boys.
“Hooray!” I shouted, my arms up, luckily in my fall.
Sarah Slumber Writes a column every week. She is the author of books, essays and plays.