Years ago, I watched, completely unsuspecting, a little animated movie called “How to Train Your Dragon”
I don’t know what I expected. It was certainly not to fal in love.
No, not with a Viking halfpint named Hiccup. With a dragon. A goofy, derpy, valiant, noble, loyal, wonderful dragon. Genus, Nightfury (a dragon so dangerous you do not engage with it at all even if you could see it which nobody ever did before they presumably died). Name, derpily enough, Toothless.
By the time the movie ended I (a grown woman) was squealing like a schoolgirl, starry-eyed, under the delighted and indulgent eye of my husband who often found my childlike enthusiasms endearing, and swearing that cats and dogs were all out of luck, for my next pet I wanted a dragon. Notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that I had no flocks of sheep with which to feed one.
That moment when he gently headbutted Hiccup’s outstretched hand (depicted in the movie still below) has stayed with me. Forever.
The Christmas of the year in which I watched that first animated movie, my husband surprised me (having mined the Internet for this with dedication) with my own Toothless. Arguably, a plush rendition, but I loved the first glimpse I got of those green eyes as I tore the wrapping off him on Christmas morning.
My husband is long gone now. My Toothless, a pledge of his love for me, a concrete proof that he listened to me at all times and knew what I loved and would move heaven and earth to provide that for me, remains.
(that final pic, it’s what happens when you let a Maine Coon into the house. They have no compunction whatsover about photobombing dragons)
I went to see the live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” on a Saturday matinee, and I have to admit I had misgivings of a sort – I loved that animated version so much that it would have HURT if they had botched this badly. But they didn’t. It worked. And I fell in love all over again. It’s a measure of how powerful, how real, something is when – hours after the movie, with the lights off and getting ready to go to sleep – I was still squealing like a lunatic inside my own head, yelling “GO TOOTHLESS” into the ether, and smiling. I don’t think that I will ever be free of that beast again. He is coiled around my heart.
The showing I went to was sparsely attended – maybe just over a dozen people in the theater all counted, including a bunch of kids who might, hand on heart, have been too young to even remember Toothless at all. But a surprising portion of the attendees were people with white or graying hair who caught each other’s eye in a knowing way. We did not know each other but we nodded at one another like old friends because we were. Toothless united us.
It was a great movie. It deserved a bigger audience. I may… have to go see it again. I may have to buy it on DVD when it comes out for purchase so that I can watch it again and again and again.
SERIOUSLY. I want a dragon.
(Oh, and if you’re wondering? in the echoing almost-emptiness of that movie theatre, there was a presence of love in the empty seat next to me, where the memory of my husband sat, watching me, smiling.)
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