Finding Neverland

There would be hardly any space between the inner room and the outer. ''Just turn the knob of my real room," she said, turning a knob in the air, ''then right away there'd be that other door." I asked her what would be in the inner room and she answered, ''All the things that are in my real room." ''Can you describe it more?" I asked. But she had grown sleepy again, and added only, ''I could do whatever I wanted in there." I sat for a moment, waiting to see if she'd go on. ''You could probably get it at Home Depot," she murmured (was she laughing a little?) before she fell asleep.

By morning my daughter seemed to have forgotten all about this wish for a room, and in fact, when I brought it up she wasn't interested in talking about it. It was as if she had alerted me to a secret door but then refused to let me in. And if I've ever asked since, she has shooed me away and skipped off (often going to play with friends and dolls inside tents they've rigged up in the living room, or under tables, or to a neighbor's tree house: The desire for little rooms is obviously thriving).

I can recall my own craving for a secret or inner space as a child, my own enthrallment with playing in there, cordoned off. It's where I made up stuff, and could pretend it all was real. I remember being 6 or so and receiving a gift of two tiny chairs, about an inch high. I remember placing them in a box, and how it felt to see that they cast two tiny shadows. A sudden feeling gripped me: Something real was present in the box; here was a secret house, which I was in charge of, a house within my own house, but this one my parents didn't know about. Maybe in contrast to the tininess of the chairs and box, I felt swelled in size when I played with them.

There is a way to enter or reenter the secret rooms of childhood, of course, and that is through the grace of the authors of many beloved and enduring children's books. Virtually all books that involve some enchantment or express a child's deepest emotional longings center on the idea of a secret world, or a room within a room.