Don't Break Your Axe

Miss G got me hooked on this show called Once Upon a Time. The broad plot is that all the fairy tale characters were cursed to come live in the Real World, aka a town called Storybrooke, forgetting their lives as fairy tale characters. Throughout the show, we see glimpses of the characters in their parallel lives.

Leroy, the Storybrooke town drunk, is also Grumpy the Dwarf. In the fairy tale world, Grumpy hatches from his egg (as dwarves do) and is handed his axe. When touched for the first time, the dwarves' axe handles tell them their names.

We see the dwarves take their axes, familiar names appearing on handles: Sleepy, Doc, Sneezy... And when Grumpy takes hold, his name flares up solid and true between two thick-knuckled grubby dwarf hands:

[cue me crying]

"The axe never lies, Dreamy," says Bossy Dwarf.

A difficult choice becomes the catalyst of Dreamy's evolution to Grumpy. Angry at a world that has no place for a dwarf with his kind of dreams, Dreamy throws himself into his work with a bitter "Heigh ho," breaking his axe. Bossy hands him a blank replacement axe; the axe itself assigns Dreamy his new name.

"I'm Grumpy now," he says, unsurprised.

I married a wide-eyed optimist; he makes me bonkers. He's completely unrealistic, scattered and impractical about almost everything. 

And I love the snot out of him for it, because god knows I'm realistic, grounded and sensible enough for any dozen Dans. Maybe more. 

About our marriage, Dan's mom said it best:

"Danny's always been this dreamer, and here you are so practical. He lifts you up with his ideas, and then you figure out how to actually get there." 

And it's true. He does. I do. We're a good team. I learned from my parents' marriage that opposites are a sublime force in the world when properly applied.

There's a little Grumpy and a little Dreamy in all of us. The trick is integrating them without breaking your axe.