Prologue - Believing in Faeries

A Pea Grows in Brooklyn
It all began in Brooklyn. Everything begins in Brooklyn. The Dodgers, Woody Allen, and me. We all had our creative start there. But while the Dodgers grew up with the thunder of cheering fans, and Woody grew up with the thunder of Coney Island's roller coaster,  I grew up with the thunder of arguing immigrants in my East New York home.  My father (Ruby) drove a checkered taxi cab and my mother (Bertha) worked as a bookkeeper in a pajama factory. Both were from Poland with memories of Russian pogroms and Ellis Island. The closest I ever came to having a nature experience was sitting in my concrete backyard watching a line of ants scurrying up a telephone pole. Brooklyn didn't have much nature. A bunch of flat top hedges, some nice maple trees, a few furry squirrels and some giant blue jays. I didn't exactly grow up in a Hallmark faery garden.  So how did I come to write a book on, of all things, faeries?

That's the question I had been asking myself for months after this book was finished. I'd call my friends and frantically ask, what if this book gets published and I'm interviewed on a talk show and they ask me about my faery history? What'll I say? I'm not your average faery-poster-on-a-wall type of gal. I'm a born and raised New Yorker: been mugged twice, can ride the subways late at night with the best of 'em, know how to shout down a taxicab and shove my way to the front of a sale line. The whole image of me with Tinkerbell and faery dust just doesn't jive.

Finally, one astute friend replied: "Everything you're worried about makes great talk show material. It's interesting. Honesty is always interesting."

Well, honesty is what I do. And what this book is based on. So let me tell you how faeries entered my life - and changed it forever.

Looking back I think it all started with grade school, a bunch of cotton balls and a few raw peas. My teacher announced one day that we were going to grow some peapods. Now I knew peapods. They were those green crunchy things that my mom and I used to sit in the kitchen and shell. I liked them raw.  I hated them cooked. So peapods and I weren't exactly strangers.  But the idea of growing them -- now THAT was a wild idea. (For those of you who come from farm country or places where you tended gardens, the notion of growing peapods is not at all preposterous. But for me since my only experience of picking vegetables was off a grocery shelf -- the whole idea of growing was reserved more for things like my father's salt and pepper beard and my mother's impatience.)

When my teacher insisted that each of us could actually grow our own pods, I couldn't believe it.  But I did as I was told. Wet some cotton balls, laid some peas in them...and waited.  A week or so later, lo and behold, some little white feet sprouted.  I had the beginning of a garden.

With the utmost precision and  care, I dug a little hole in the one tiny patch of soil in my hard cement backyard. I even stuck in little sticks tied with pink ribbon as boundaries for my new little garden. Everyday I would run home from school, eager to see my pea's progress. And every day I was disappointed.  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - nothing. Thursday Friday Saturday - nothing. Quickly I began to lose faith. I never really believed that I could grow my own peapod anyway. I carried the disappointment with me as if it were a dead puppy.  Soon I stopped visiting the garden. I had lost hope.

But then one day, a few weeks later, for some reason, I decided to check just one more time. I walked over to my make-shift garden and there before my wide-as-saucers eyes was the most amazing miracle I had ever seen. Poking out of the patch of Brooklyn soil was one tall green stalk, tender and lovely as ever, with a real live crunchy-as-a-store-bought peapod bobbing beside it. I knelt down, my little mouth hanging open, heart leaping, and stared at the unbelievable feat. A peapod. A brand new peapod. With trembling hands, I gently opened one end.

OH MY GOD...PEAS!  Real peas were inside.  This was a bonafide peapod! Just like the one mom and I shelled! I simply couldn't believe it. It was the biggest magic I had ever seen. I will never, ever forget it.

Looking back at that incident, I realize now that there was even more magic surrounding it.  There was something else there then. Something invisible. Something indescribable. As a little girl, I took it for granted. It was so ordinary that I didn't even notice it. But now, decades later, I realize what "it" was. A faery. A magical being. A place where wonder and innocence resides. A realm as real and palatable as cloud banks or tide pools. A land where something...or someone actually exists, where miracles are everyday occurrences. That's what knocked my socks off that day.  And it wasn't until nearly three decades later when I was battling the worst urban depression I had ever had that "it" happened to me again...

Fast forward to 1990.  I'm a single woman living alone in Manhattan. I've got a quaint (and cheap) apartment in chic Soho; I've got lots of wonderful friends; I've got a relatively successful free lance writing career; and I'm in the midst of the worst depression of my life. Without going into too much detail (because that would make another book), suffice to say that I had come to a crossroads in my life and I sure as hell didn't like my choice of street signs. I felt, lost, unfulfilled, dissatisfied, empty. And oddly enough, the way my depression manifested was that I started spending hours and hours a day in whatever park I could find, leaning against ginkgo trees, weeping, and feeding bagel crumbs to sparrows.  All I knew was that I was literally starving for nature.  I didn't understand it. I thought I was going crazy. It actually got so bad that I was turning down rent-paying freelance writing work because I just couldn't compromise my heart anymore.  Looking back at it now, it all makes sense. After all, my entire life was skyscrapers, subways, and cement. And now I was paying for it; hungering day and night for anything green and alive (and that didn't mean my downstairs neighbor on Saint Paddy's Day). The only thing I knew was that I desperately had to have a serious dose of Mother Nature.

And that's when all these strange things started to happen. Like with Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. But instead of voices whispering in cornfields, I had voices nagging me over corn muffins; and instead of ghostly ballplayers in Iowa, I had luminescent bushes in Central Park and laughing tulips on Houston Street.

So serious was this nature crisis that I did the one thing that any hard-core New Yorker would never, ever do.  I  went so far as to break the most forbidden New York law.  I MOVED!  I left the center of the universe and, through a series of wild events (which is indeed another story entirely), I ended up as far away from Manhattan as is humanly possible for a girl from Brooklyn. I landed in a place I had never even had the courage to dream about.  Hawaii.

And it was here, in a land so green and alive, that "it" happened again. The peapod "it." The magic kingdom. The F word. I came face to face with, or should I say, heart to heart with the extraordinary realm of faeries.

Now, don't laugh at me.  You know me by now.  I wouldn't lie.  I can't.  I'm a New Yorker.  We don't lie.  We simply tell you the FRICKIN' TRUTH and stomp away.  So when I say  what I said I really mean it.

It was kind of a crazy unexpected out of the blue sort of thing. I was having a long distance, very expensive phone conversation with a good friend of mine from New York and somehow she brought up the subject of, well, you know...faeries. She said it might be interesting, what with all the publishing fuss over angels and such, to write a book about faeries. I snickered and  hung up the phone. Faeries, hmmph, what a silly subject. Images of Tinkerbell and little winged women in see-through gowns.  I had absolutely no interest in them.  Dumb idea...

But something tugged at me.  Like an annoying little kid who has to go to the bathroom.  Faeries?  Faeries?  I  couldn't stand it any longer so I called up a dear friend who also lived in Hawaii and who was into all this ethereal stuff.  "What's the scoop on faeries?" I asked, not really expecting any kind of interesting answer.  My friend was quick to respond.  "They're nature spirits," she said cheerfully.  "Actually, quite intriguing. They preside over the trees and bushes and flowers, things like that.  Not at all like Tinkerbell.  A lovely group of beings, actually.  Couldn't exist without them."

Nature spirits?  Tree beings?  Bush beings?  Peapod beings?! A tiny, tiny, tiny voice inside me chuckled. And over the next  two weeks you could almost hear the thunder and lightening in my studio.  I wrote day and night.  I was awakened at 3 in the morning with faery songs and faery laws and faery legends.  I would ride my bike past blooming hedges of fist-sized red hibiscus flowers and nearly  kill myself stopping short because those flowers were shouting at me.  I would stare into wild orchids and scribble furiously what they were singing.  I would sit beside plumeria trees and entire worlds were given to me.

And after it was all over,  I sort of woke up out of this furious faery fever, read what I wrote and thought, OH MY GOD I'VE WRITTEN A BOOK ON FAERIES!

So you see, I didn't really mean to do it.  But "it" must have really meant to "do" me.  And oddly enough, despite my own disbelief and skepticism, writing the book has changed my life.  I can't walk past a flower or a tree branch or a hedge without doing this 'thing' - this 'thing' that the book teaches you how to do - which is sort of how to shift your seeing and feeling so you can enter their realm. I'm telling you, after you read this book, a walk through K-Mart's garden section will never be the same.

That's my story (at least the faery episode). Yes, I'm still living in Hawaii. And yes, everything here is still very green and very much alive. And even though I could never again live in a place like New York City, I will always love it. Because if it wasn't for that little urban peapod, I don't think I'd be here today. 

Enjoy reading the book. Keep an open mind. And remember the one and only rule of the faery realm: Magic grows anywhere. Even in Brooklyn.