“Puff the Magic Dragon” was when I discovered that songs can make you cry.
“A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,
Painted wings and giants’ rings make way for other toys.”
The story of how Jackie Paper outgrew his dragon friend, who then “sadly slipped into his cave,” broke my heart when I was a tadpole. (I revisited that feeling during the “When She Loved Me” scene in Toy Story 2.)
I know it’s said, “When I became a man, I gave up childish things,” and our childhood toys and imaginary friends don’t really have sentience or feelings, but the innocence in our love for childish things is so precious and so a part of who we were and always will be.
And what power music has to express that special grief for our innocence.
The other day I heard “Puff” for the first time in a while and felt the long-ago lump in my throat and that sadness for the poor magic dragon — but also that sadness for Jackie Paper, the little boy who didn’t believe in magic anymore.
In the introduction to Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury tells the story of how his nine-year-old friends shamed him into tearing up his Buck Rogers comic strips that he had collected, but after a time he realized he had given up an important part of his identity, and he went back to collecting.
“Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to be able to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What is the cure? …
“I don’t want to over-estimate this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. Without him, I could not have survived to introduce these essays.”
I happen to agree that hanging on to the shreds of our childhood innocence is one way to stay sane in this nasty, cynical world.
And so I grieve for Jackie Paper as much as I do for Puff the Magic Dragon — how much was lost when that young man chose to stop frolicking in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.
