“Ok, tuck in. Ready? Once upon a time, a long, long time ago there was a bau bau … Miro…?”
“Un cane”
“I mean in English it is a…”
“Ohh yea. A dog.”
“Thank you. That’s what he was. There was a young little dog who could always be found wondering the streets of the big city. He would look around, discover some left over food and occasionally even find some fantastic bits. One day, he saw that a a gaggle of similar creatures were following their mother, and did feel a bit sad, but then he spotted a piece of tomato, right there on top of all the other trash of the Pizza shop, he gladly distracted himself.
He would bark very loudly when those other little animals you know miao, miao… would attempt to take his bits…. Miro?”
“ Until the day he crossed paths with an old tired …Miao… Miao “
Miro quickly interjected “ yes a cat… ““Ohh yes. Cats ”

“Yes. Exactly it was a big, half blind old Miao, miao, who is in no way afraid of anyone else”.

A few days after arriving back home from the hospital with a big scar on my head my sun, while cuddling in bed put his hand on my scull and started to touch it. He asked me “does it hurt Daddy?”
“No. Not really but do be careful, as… it’s ‘fragile’”. How could I talk to my three year old sun about what had happened. How could my boy deal with the complexity of a very aggressive type of brain cancer, when even I was not completely clear of what doctors and statistics were telling me. I couldn’t tell my sun “don’t worry, everything is fine”, because it wasn’t. In fact, it was him, and his imaginative attitude towards life that really did rescue me from the bleakness of reality.

I guess that the tale about a little dog and an old cat has already elucidated, to you reader, how my sun and I have developed a new lexicon to confront some of my amazing new handicaps. In fact, my issues with a very bad short term memory, not having any recollection of the names of people, vegetables, most animals, colors and streets have now all become parts of our private adventures while walking towards school. Without too much philosophizing, I realized that while hanging out with Miro, my various new handicaps have to always become superpowers.

One of the handicaps that was particularly curious for him from the beginning was my lack of reading. While up to that moment Doctor Seuss stories had aided me in my pursuit of raising my sun as native English speaker while living in Italy, Miro did not care, he just knew that when daddy laid down next to him with those books, usually rhymes would start coming out. But sadly now, when daddy attempted to read him those stories, his brain did not like them here or there, it did not like them anywhere. He would not, could not with his eyes, not with glasses or even bright light. And so, very quickly we discovered that inventing good night tales of young and old animals, was a great source for our good night stories. In fact, he often seams to follow these bespoke tales even more than the ones printed on illustrated pages.

A few weeks after I had come back home, Miro, without any particular change of presentation started to ask me about the lovely doctors who had taken away the ‘bad stuff’ from my head, and just a few minutes into my story, as he looked intensely in my eyes, he touched my head and exactly in the same earnestness said, “ I am going to take care of my trains now. We’ll continue this at some other time.” And, just a few steps away started with “Brum… Brumm… “. As a three year old his attention span for such discussions was four to five minutes maximum so, I too could feel satisfied with that information and move on to contemplate other things like what we were going to eat for dinner.

He had no problem accepting that Dad now had to take at least two naps during the day, and so when he would go into his fantasy world of trains and Legos, he would now fantastically remember to keep the “Bum, bum..” to a lower level of intensity.

Recently (he is now eight) I saw him talking to some of his friends that had come over for dinner and he was telling them quite seriously about the surgeons that operated me. I have no idea how his friends read his tales, or how he remembered the details of those events. Up to this day, I have attempted to answer his questions sincerely as they arise, without hiding anything from him. While we were walking through one of the beautiful parks of Rome, he asked me “Papa’, are you going to die?”. Just another question that surprised me but, I guess that the location and the tone which he had selected made it ok for me to tell him “Well, in theory they had said that I should already be dead…” and while standing next to him with my shoulders all broadened, like a super hero “maybe they cut all the bad stuff out, and I will die when I am… old.”

I am not sure, but he really does not seem afraid of death. He enjoys becoming every kind of character, even the really bad ones, and he has always allowed me to follow him in his transformations of reality.

Then last night he asked me to continue the story of the night before. Aware of my bad memory he quickly narrated to me the basic story turns and the details of the two central characters, he even told me that they were called Tom and Jack (which I completely did not remember). Nevertheless, so continues that story of the old cat, who, while believing that he is teaching that young dog new tricks, is actually learning how to view his own history differently.