make believe

#41

3 Aug 2025

Dear Elanor,

You’re at an anime con (convention) this weekend. Your first costume was a starflower. Starflower comes from your name. Elanor is a made-up word with a made-up meaning, the invention of JRR Tolkien. In one of his elvish languages, it’s the name for a small silver or gold flower that catches the light of the sun and stars. Your name means “the light of stars.” For that first Halloween as a family of three, Papa put on a pair of sunglasses, I wore bell bottoms, and you were our flower child. I sewed a little felt hood in the shape of yellowy petals and painted rosy circles on your cheeks.

Over the ensuing years your costumes have stemmed more and more from your own creativity and less and less from your parents’. You’ve been a Tawny Scrawny Lion and Princess Batman, a rainbow tiger and a spotted bat and a semi-biblically-accurate angel, (Cru)Ella and Envy. When I was a kid I was an onion in my family’s Rabbit Stew Parade, so you can be grateful to’ve escaped that fate. I loved cosplay almost as much as you and your Aunt Lauren, although I just called it dress up. Every kid knew about dress up clothes, a closet or chest heaped with outlandish styles and assorted career accessories—bonnets, bandanas, petticoats, pantaloons, helmets, holsters, handcuffs, a slate, a stethoscope, an apron, an eyepatch. Perhaps our interest in inward qualities draws us to imaginary roles over ordinary occupations. As a teen I dressed up as Eowyn and Eponine, characters known for their fearlessness and yearning. After my wedding I stored away my wool cloak just in case some need arose. On my honeymoon I faced a difficult choice between two souvenirs: Jack Sparrow’s tricorner or Indiana Jones’ fedora? (Which would you choose?)

But I didn’t just want to wear costumes, I felt compelled to fashion them, to paper mache headpieces and stitch fabric wings. In college theatre productions I chicken-wired a boulder, sculpted a fruit-laden hat, facepainted wrinkles, and shoe polished hair. Why do we make masks? Why do we make believe? Not to hide, but to seek. How else would we try on traits we cannot access otherwise, practice potential futures, act out what we admire or abhor? We test out being treated like a hero or villain, a monster, a clown, or a rare endangered marsupial. We put on a persona and look through her eyeholes, familiarizing ourselves with specific strengths and weaknesses, needs and abilities, fears and desires. We clothe our bodies in armor or rags. We slip strange shoes onto our feet and step into the motion of an unfamiliar song. Are we scary? Beautiful? Funny? Yes and yes and yes, we are. We are winners and losers, emperors and fools. Each form we inhabit leaves traces on our skin, on our psyche. Underneath our capes and gowns and cardboard cutouts we become what we pretend to be.

Rather like clothing, the name on your birth certificate is a pronouncement of possibility—a blessing, a prophecy, a charge. Embody its meaning as only you can. Fulfill it. Wear it with care. As you aspire to become it, it will become you. You are a flower. Fleeting puff, fragrant crown, ditch glimmer, brightly-hued bouquet. You are a star. You are magic and science, wave and particle, fire and light. A pinprick adorning the dark. Will you guide navigators, measure seasons, inspire legends?

I don’t know what costume-ry has to do with the prairie except that living in a place is like putting on a life. You and I don’t want to merely wear it, we must participate. We’re compelled to give shape and color to this drama we’re enacting. So we paint walls and plant gardens. We map out paths and encode messages. We catch a drop of golden sun, and creative love bursts out of us on every side.

that last one is Brett the Jet