The Man Who Made Me Believe Again

It's been nearly a year since we visited San Diego to attend the yearly Comic Con. Right after our return, I diligently posted and discussed my experiences there, specifically in San Diego in general, as well as in the San Diego Zoo. But I never said anything about our experience in the Comic Con itself, the main reason of our visit to SD. I think that it has taken a long while for the experience to sink in and get digested: it was so rich, so vast, so powerful... we spent 5 days dawdling around in a convention center, and it's amazing to believe that those 5 days changed our lives a little bit.

However, I'm gonna have to postpone the review of the whole deal in favor of the highlight of the visit, which deserves its own blog entry.

Mr. Peter S. Beagle
The man who made me believe again



This happened on the fourth day of our visit, as we were walking around the show floor looking at the different booths and just gawking and being amazed by the variety of it all. But something caught my eye then, an echo of my roots; more than an echo, a stark beacon. If you look closely at the photograph above, you will see what I saw: two big posters at each side of the booth, one of Lady Amalthea, one of The Last Unicorn.

The Last Unicorn is a story that has been in my conscious since I saw it when I was a small child, so this wasn't an "Ohmygawd, so LONG since I saw this last, I had forgotten!" kind of moment. I just wasn't expecting it there, among all the Supermans and sci-fi characters. It caught me by surprise so much that it brought tears to my eyes, and the guy at the booth caught me at that, crying a bit, with a wide smile of amazement on my face. So he seizes the moment to start driving his sale (they were selling DVD copies, as well as books by the author), but then he twisted it around a bit and starts telling me about a legal situation the author has been going through, regarding unpaid work, including being cheated out of payment for his collaboration in the making of the The Last Unicorn movie (you can read a bit more about it here).

And then, the moment of brain-shock, he tells me that the man who wrote this wonderful story was right there. Just then and there, I started bawling my heart out ... and let me explain:

Little Diana was brought up surrounded by fantastical figures, either inherited from her aunt's toy collection or things that popped up in the toy and entertainment market. Her world included gods from the Greek and Roman mythology, unicorns, mermaids, pegasus, horses, mammoths, faeries, spirits and the occasional princess from a fairy tale. These characters had sprung up from books, drawings and movies. And one of the movies that introduced her to the unicorns was The Last Unicorn.

The unicorn, as a figure, would accompany Little Diana for years to come, until adolescence would render the unicorn incompatible with her interests and beliefs. However, in the time she allowed it so, she surrounded herself with unicorn plush toys, rubber figurines (Hasbro's My Little Pony had a lot to do with that as well), drawings, posters, notebooks, books, movies ... all things unicorn came hand in hand with as much as she could find about mermaids (which was much less, since this was before Disney bastardized Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and provoked the deluge of mermaid merchandise afterwards).

Little by little, all unicorn things were shed, and only a distant memory remained of the legendary horned beast. The steadfast belief that unicorns existed gave way to a good-natured indifference ... until she met with the one who made her believe first.

Mr. Peter S. Beagle, author to The Last Unicorn, creator of the world that in its turn helped me create mine, came over to me and hugged me, and talked to me, and embraced me in his words. During the time of our conversation, I was enveloped in a warm cocoon of stories, lullabied by a soft, flowing voice that spoke of the roots of my world, of the nutrients that gave life to that humongous tree that was the fantasy I knew. He reached into my heart and blew life back into that dormant seed that was Little Diana and her steadfast beliefs.

At that moment I felt more alive and more eternal than I had felt in decades. I still choke up when I remember how it felt to be before the man that helped shape what I've become. No other worlds existed at that moment, only him, and me curled up around the fluid stream of flowers, magic and music his words made.

I purchased a different book from the one I already knew by heart: The Unicorn Sonata. It sat in my nightstand's shelf for a few months, but as soon as I read it, it became water to the seed Mr. Beagle had brought back to life. As soon as I finished it and closed its covers, I realized: once again I believed in unicorns with all of my heart.