2024 marks the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, with the year predicted to be a good time for fresh starts.

“Daddy, Jackie Paper should write Puff a letter and say why he doesn’t come to see him anymore,” my daughter Elizabeth once told me.

We’d been spending a lot of time thinking about Puff the Magic Dragon and his friend Jackie, and how anyone could ever become so grown up as to forget best friends, magic and the autumn mist in the land called Honah Lee.

“Maybe,” I told her, “Jackie Paper’s kids, and their kids, will discover Puff’s cave and play with him again.” This was scant comfort for a girl who still cherished Olivia, the Mexican mutt impervious to house training, and Grover, our gentle black kitty too fat to climb a tree when the coyote came — long-lost pets she barely knew as the thinnest little slip of an infant.

Dragons live forever

Dragons live forever, and so does love, according to Elizabeth. Once felt, even if lost for a while, it’s still alive out in the universe, flapping around waiting to be recaptured, like a butterfly in a net. Better never to let it get away. But it’s never so lost as not to be found.

How did dragons, something we’re told never existed, come to inhabit our dreams across thousands of years and miles?

Pull Quote

For nearly all we people of the dragons, they represented the ancient, uncontrollable power of the universe, awfully alive and capricious.

Explore humanity’s first cities along the Tigris and Euphrates, and you’ll find 40-centuries-old dragon carvings. Look carefully under the peat bogs of Britain and you may yet discover golden Celtic broaches cast in the shape of flying serpents, while the richest Chinese textiles from the earliest times feature the fearsome four-clawed yellow dragon reserved for the emperor. For nearly all we people of the dragons, they represented the ancient, uncontrollable power of the universe, awfully alive and capricious. On some level, we needed them — and we especially needed something to fear other than the miserable facts of living in the 14th century and before.

Some of the old English fairy tales we used to read at bedtime deal with dragons, and even old as they are, they speak of dragons as something far beyond the confines of ordinary time.

“We know there were fiery dragons in those days, like George and his dragon in the legend. But there! It’s not the same world nowadays. The world is turned topsy-turvey since then, like as if you’d turn it over with a spade!”

Ancient horrors come to light

Fossilized dinosaur bones are the most rational (and least emotionally satisfying) explanation for the nearly worldwide belief in dragons or something like them.

Although it was only in the 19th century that fossils were reassembled into complete skeletons, commissioned for public display by Pittsburgh tycoon Andrew Carnegie, even our most distant ancestors must have come across mysterious stone bones and teeth sticking out from eroding hillsides.

It’s easy to imagine the dread such bones would have elicited in people still as often the prey of leopards and wolves as hunters of them. Migrating through the endless steppes and forests, think of seeing for the first time a single leg bone taller than a man. Think of fearing whether this creature’s brothers might live in the cavern just visible in a distant cliff. Hurry past and build a big fire against the night.

One of the easy first steps in geology is keeping your eyes open for things that are different — a vein of hard white quartz cutting through nondescript black rock may contain gold; a patch of pale yellow contrasting with a brown hillside may be an outcropping of uranium ore. Coming home from the desert, our family would often stop at such a yellow patch in the spring, looking for freshly eroded dinosaur knuckles. We’d take them home, and wish we still believed in dragons.

Now allies

Only in those years of late 20th century were people finally comfortable enough to regard dragons, our ancient fantastic enemies, as sympathetic creatures capable of being a child’s playmate.

“If I had a dragon I’d ride him every day and take super good care of him,” said Elizabeth, the conqueror of fear. I don’t suppose she’ll have that exact opportunity. But I know she was really talking about something else: Carefully tending to our loving connections. This is a good lesson for Valentine’s Day, and all days.