When I was a little boy, I was very frightened, and also a bedwetter, and I would make up stories every night to help me sleep, I knew my father would be coming in later to scold me and lecture me on my weakness.  He couldn’t bear to have a son who was such a mess.

It was a gift, of course,  the birth of my life as a writer, this story-telling, although I could not have known it during that very lonely and dark time. One of my stories was about the Old Man and the Good Witch.

In my story, an old man lived in a house deep in the woods, he was disconnected from the world, living in peace but also isolation. He was lonely and loveless and very frightened. Later in my life, this kind of fear would be seen as a disease, but then it was just considered life.

In my mind, desperate to create fantasies to help me escape my own torment, the man was sitting alone in his dark house, shrouded by a dark and colorless forest. He wore drab black and brown clothes, his socks were threadbare, his house unkempt, he had no reason to clean it up or make it look presentable.

The walls were drab and moldy, there was no color or light about him, his clothes, his home. In my story, he wrote poems all day and once a month, he would trek into town to send them off and sell them and that is how he lived.

The Old Man had given up on himself, embarrassed to be so grim and joyless that he hid himself from the world and avoided anyone he might love or who might love him. He ate soup and bread and sat alone at night and read and wrote his poems, then cried himself to sleep. After his beloved old dog died, he vowed to be by himself for the rest of his life.

One day a Good Witch appeared in his yard with a magic wand, and she made gardens appear, and opened up the spaces between the trees so that sunlight could appear. And she cleaned his windows and opened the blinds and shutters and let the light in and waved her want, and vases appeared full of flowers, and bright stones and crystals on the windowsills and beautiful paintings and sketches on the walls.

And then she painted the drab walls yellow and red and blue and the bright colors of the rainbow and made his drab old clothes disintegrate, replacing them bright blues and yellows, even colorful socks.

The color and light brightened his life, and changed him. He became a kind of flower himself, opening up to the world, smiling and laughing, he could almost feel the cobwebs coming off him when she was near. He went into town more. People came to see him. His poems became beautiful and wise and generous, people wanted to buy them.

He fell in love with the Good Witch and got married, and had several happy children, even a new dog and some cats. It turns out she had always loved him from a distance, but could never enter his dark space.  She saw what was inside of him.

They lived happily ever after.

I called the story The Old Man And The Good Witch and I wanted to get it published, but I never wrote it down.

I think the stories made me feel less alone, and after a few years, my stories became the stories of adolescent boys – brave cavalry officers leading his troops into glorious battle, saving the day. I forgot about the Old Man and the Good Witch.

Today, a startling revelation, as I put on the new socks Maria bought me from the Over The Moon Beads And Gift Shop on Main Street in Cambridge. She and Heather have been plotting this for a while. I can’t tell you how much I love my new socks, my feet, for 68 years, have been covered in black and brown and grey, socks were simply something to keep my feet covered and warm, now suddenly – Maria got me several other pairs as well – my socks are something else. They  bright my feet, make me smile, change the way I look at myself. Really.

It’s like having a Spring garden on your feet. (I highly recommend them as a gift for men, who sometimes get drab and crabby and closed up in their maleness. Heather will send them to you.) Color heals. I can’t bear to put old gray socks on my feet any longer.

And then it hit me, and this kind of jolted me, gave me chills. I suddenly remembered the story of the Old Man And The Good Witch. I was living it, I just wanted to cry and absorb it. My story had happened to me, there is a mystical side to the world and it is real. I was living alone on big farm in upstate New York, I was lonely, falling apart. There was no color  or light in my life. I had given up on love and hope, I  had descended into a bleak and dark place.

Then this Good Witch arrived. She encouraged me to take photographs, she told me they were beautiful and she looked at every one and praised them. She was sad too, but we fell in love and became happy together. When we had to move to our new, smaller farm, it was tired, drab, dark, even barren.

She brought her magic to the farm. She waved her wand all over the place. She let me cook and shop and buy her books. Every night, she still looks at my photographs and tells me how good and interesting they sometimes are.

She built gardens, tended the flowers. She became a warrior for color and light. She painted the living room white, then yellow and red. She turned our dark little bathroom into a gallery of the rainbow, a work of art. She picked out tiles for the shower, then for the kitchen floor. She put crystals and flowers and rocks on the windowsills, turning every dark spot bright. She invited me into the woods, found crystals in the earth, talked to the trees and birds.

She pulled up the crackling old strips on the counter tops, she painted them a classy black. She eyes the few remaining colorless and ugly patches of the house. She will pick them off, one by one.

She tells me I am handsome, sexy. Once in awhile, I even believe her. But she did agree to marry me, and she does seem happy here.

Sometimes I laugh at her, when she cries over a dead tomato plant, or re-homes a spider, sometimes shake my head in wonder as she tells me the story of the mushroom. But I always listen, I never want to be anywhere else.

Everywhere she went, she created color, art and light.

Walking around the farmhouse this morning, I saw the dimensions of how she had transformed our farm over the past couple of years. There are flowers everywhere, a fiber chair, statues and pots filled with flowers, gardens ringing the old farmhouse. I love this, I support it in every which way, I could never have done it by myself, not in a million years.

I help scrape, I paint, I water, I dig, but I am not a witch, Good or Bad. I am the Old Man in the story and Maria is the Good Witch. I love the magic, but I don’t have the magic in me. The Good Witch wears beads and necklaces, scarves and leggings, vests and skirts, she trails art and color like a shooting star sometimes.

She talks to flowers and communicates with donkeys. Animals follow her like the Pied Piper.

Sometimes, she makes me nervous. She eyes my blue shirts and jeans, clothes I wear every day and last year bought me a canary polo short, too bright for me still, I feel like Tweety Bird. I can hardly believe these powers were hidden in her for so long. They are out now, they are never going away again.

And then, there were the socks, another wave of the wand, and more color, more light, and do you really know, good readers, how much of a difference color and light and art make to a human being, and a house, to a life? I do not have magical powers, but I am a warrior for color and light and hope.

I am changing.

I can tell you, it is mystical, unimaginable. I will never take it for granted. I wish for all the Good Witches to go to the angry men in power and put beautiful and colorful new socks on their feet, the world would be transformed.

I sat outside on the rocking chair this morning and closed my eyes and went back in time, as I had done so many times before, and went to see the little boy, huddling and quivering in his bed, and I took him in my arms, gave him a big hug, and I said, “hey, there, it’s me. I came back to tell you that the story comes true. The Good Witch is real, and she will come back to find you. Look out for her. You got the girl. Go to sleep.”

So maybe the cornballs at Disney are right after all, maybe dreams do come true, maybe stories are as powerful and important as I believe they are. Mine came true. I wish the same for you.