Once Upon A Time

In the largest city of a northern kingdom that swelters in August and shivers in November, there is a cinder block and stucco maze six stories high. I spend my weekday mornings dwarfed by its space, so vast that I've only set foot on levels one and five over the course of two months. The eccentric floor plan is the result of a series of additions, each completed with no thought toward future expansion. Hallways don't stretch straight through the building; instead, they zigzag haphazardly, turning at abrupt right angles when classrooms get in their way. Doors to the outside seem an afterthought, inserted into the walls at random intervals without anything resembling lobby space. This jumbled structure is fitting, as the building houses a similarly eclectic set of programs: GED and ESL classes, at least two preschools, a secondary school, a baby school. There's a testing center here somewhere, and a job center as well, and I don't even know what takes up the space on the third or sixth floors. Every now and then, though, a window into the rest of the building's life opens in my very own first-floor hall, and I get a glimpse of happily ever after.

Just inside one set of double doors connecting our hallway with the outside world, there is a medium-sized bulletin board, where a pale pine frame surrounds sheets of yellow construction paper. It's not a particularly elaborate display location, tucked as it is between two doorframes, but such space within these walls is valued and new postings go up with regularity. The board currently showcases several essays written by recent immigrants studying at the Employment Opportunity Center. The texts vary in format; some essays talk solely about work in the United States, while others delve into the stories that surround immigration. Every time I pass, I try to catch a glimpse of the printed pages, comparing and contrasting these recorded lives with each other and with my own. But of late, my gaze has consistently moved toward the same two paragraphs of double-spaced text. Second from the right in the upper row, a woman begins her tale with, "Once upon a time".

When we are small, we learn that "Once upon a time" is a gateway to perfection. As those opening words are uttered, we know what to expect: handsome princes, fairy godmothers, glass slippers and magic beans. True, we can be sure that evil enchantments and foolhardy decisions and heavy burdens will be present, but the structure of fairy tales as we know them dictates that at the close of the story, the characters we're meant to care about will head off safely into happiness for all time. In today's renditions, we don't always hear that Snow White's evil stepmother dances herself to death in white-hot slippers; we seldom discover the fate of Cinderella's step-family. Instead, we emphasize the escape from captivity, the adventure-rich journey, the ride toward the glowing horizon. We know that when a story begins with "Once upon a time," it must end with "happily ever after."

Of course, in everyday life, happily ever after can't be attained simply by starting the day with, "Once upon a time, I went to work." No safeguarding phrase ensures our eventual happiness; no godmother's wand accounts for any magic we may encounter. Most of our real-world narratives don't fit in among tales of knights and dragons and elves, because more often than not hope and effort simply refuse to result in perfection. But I forget this reality for an instant as I stand in the hallway looking at two paragraphs of someone else's fairy tale, her dream of a happy ending printed in sharp black letters on white paper bordered in yellow on display in the hallway of an unlikely castle built of cinder block and stucco.