People Who Get Things

When I was little, I looked forward to when my parents would go out of town and leave me and my brother with our usual babysitter, our family friend "Aunt" Chris (aka Christine Agnes Camp). She was chronologically an adult, but to me at least, she was more like a playmate or a friend. We loved when she'd play "Octopus," when she'd get on the ground and chase us around. I think most of all, she wasn't afraid to be a kid with us.

The thing that I think of most now is that she "got" the realm of fantasy and make-believe. She brought over the old BBC Narnia movies (taped from PBS, I believe) and watched them with us. OK, I'm not sure my brother actually watched them; he's never liked fantasy at all (you should hear him vent about how Quidditch is a fraud!). But Aunt Chris and I did, and then we discussed how faithful to the books (or not) they were.

Today, I'm amazed now that probably the majority of people I know (including several of the VERY dearest people to me) just don't "get" fantasy at all. If they try to watch a movie or read a book set in another world, they just can't follow it. (Which means that some of the people dearest to me will never "get"--and probably never even be able to read--the Christian-romance-fantasy-with-pirates novel that Maggie Phillippi and I wrote and are putting the final edits on now.) Now, I do have a hard time getting into adult fantasy books, but I'm just SO fascinated by the realm of the imaginary and the speculative.

Aunt Chris passed away fairly suddenly a couple weeks ago. I'm grateful she loved Jesus, but it's still sad. I don't know if she would have been interested in reading a romance, but it hit me that she may have been one of the people who might have "got" that book Maggie and I wrote. I'll never know now...or at least not this side of the grave for sure.