Exit the Dragon

I write these silly things all the time, and sometimes writing a title takes longer than writing the whole essay. But sometimes, a perfect title comes along and just writes itself. 

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Not only is this a perfect title, it's also not a metaphorically perfect title. This post really is about a dragon. See? It’s huge, isn’t it? 

What? You have an even better title?
No, you don't. Come on. 

This dragon is notable for several reasons. First of all, it’s notable that a neighbor has a huge inflatable dragon on their front lawn. Secondly, the dragon has been there for months. Maybe years. I don’t know. I walk past it all the time, and only in the last few days has it occurred to me, just barely, to wonder about it. It can’t be a birthday thing, and it can’t be there to commemorate some dragon-focused holiday because it’s been there forever. Though some people do keep their Christmas decorations up until March, so who knows. 

When I say that the dragon is on a neighbor’s front lawn, I mean a distant neighbor, six or seven streets away. I see the dragon only when I pass their house during my neighborhood walks. I don’t know how the actual neighbors, who have to look at the dragon all the time, feel about it. On the one hand, I think that people should be able to do what they want to do on their own property. On the other hand, it’s a huge red dragon, and what the hell? What in the actual hell? 

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My husband and I went for a walk the day after I wrote this. When we turned onto the street where the dragon lives, I didn’t see it right away and I thought well, isn’t that ironic that the dragon disappeared the very day after I realized that he had been there for months. We don’t know what we have until it is gone, I suppose. But then we walked a few more steps, and found that he was right there where he belonged; he just isn’t visible from the intersection. 

“How long has that dragon been there?” I asked my husband. “When did you first notice him?” 

“A while ago,” my husband said helpfully. A while. I could have come up with that timetable myself. “Maybe it’s a corona thing,” he said. 

I hadn’t considered this, but perhaps he’s right. Perhaps the bright red dragon is meant to represent the ever-present threat of the plague. I thought backward to try to pinpoint the time when I first noticed the dragon, and I realized that I don’t really remember anything pre-corona. If it happened any time before March 13, 2020, then it’s ancient history, from a time when dragons maybe actually did roam the earth. 

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In 2019, I read Maeve Brennan’s The Long-Winded Lady. Maeve Brennan was an Irish writer who lived in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s (and possibly before and after). She wrote a column, also called "The Long-Winded Lady," for the New Yorker. The book is a best-of compilation of those columns. 

Maeve Brennan might have been long-winded in person. I guess that’s the stereotype of Irish people: talkative, even garrulous. But her columns weren’t long-winded at all. They were very spare and succinct. She wrote mostly about New York City, and how every time she felt settled somewhere, that somewhere would change. She moved around all the time, from one temporary furnished apartment or hotel suite to another. Sometimes, she had to move because a building she lived in would soon be razed to make way for a bigger, more modern building. She didn’t complain about change itself, but she lamented the pace. It was as if she was trying to maintain a record, a point-in-time snapshot of how a neighborhood or block looked during the time that she occupied it, but change came so rapidly and so unexpectedly that sometimes a whole building would disappear before she could describe it to herself, and then its memory was gone too.

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So I wrote the dragon part of this essay months ago, and promptly forgot about it, because what was the point? A post about a giant inflatable dragon seemed apropos of exactly nothing in life. And then I started walking around the neighborhood again, because the pool was closed, and it was walking weather again. And I walked past the dragon house, and the dragon was gone. 

I couldn't remember for sure if it was the right house, but I knew the street, and that street was entirely free of dragons, real or imagined. There was a SOLD sign on the front lawn of the house that I thought was the dragon house, and when I looked back at the picture, I saw that it was the same house. I don't know if the old owner banished the dragon for fear that it would scare off potential buyers, or if the new owner managed to look past the dragon to see the house behind it, but then got rid of him as the first order of new home ownership business. No matter, one way or the other. The dragon is gone. People live and work on Maeve Brennan's New York streets, and have no idea what they looked like fifty years ago. And a few months from now, the new home will host friends and family who will never know that the street they're visiting was once a dragon's home. He was once a part of the neighborhood landscape, but things change. Things move on.