Posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009
Horror tales for the crib
I’ve always been a proponent of avant garde fiction. Well. Good avant garde fiction. Being in the liberally-biased media, I make a comfortable living at it myself. Years ago, when I was reading to my then five-month-old daughter a good night story and I kept stopping. My daughter would offer a curious look and squinch up her face ever so cute, as if to say: “Was this written by a Democrat?” Our pre-bed children’s book was “Feathers and Fools.” It’s an award-winning fable about the silliness of war. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn it was written by a Frenchman. The author’s name is Mem Fox and the gist of it is how the swans and peacocks grew mistrustful of their differences and started stockpiling weapons. I’m not making this up. The two bird groups started gathering feathers. They sharpen and hide them in the rushes. When one of the birds flies over with a twig in its beak, he is mistaken for an incoming missile and that pretty much launches Bird World War III. Just about all the swans and peacocks killed each other off. My own prejudice notwithstanding, I saw this as no great tragedy as I think swans are overly romanticized bullies of the feathered world and peacocks are just plain annoying, especially when they start cawing at four in the morning. I’m getting suspicious where this is going, but I read on, aloud, until I get to this one passage: “Soon cries filled the air and blood darkened the earth.” Well. Yeah. I’ve got a five-month old sitting in my lap pausing every once in a while to look upside down up at me with those big blue eyes and “...blood darkened the skies” are just the last words I’d like her to hear before beddy-bye. Long before I was a father, I had trouble with the ancient children’s song, “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Here’s the first stanza: “Rock-a-bye babe, in the tree top. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall and down will come baby, cradle and all.” Nice message. It makes me want to roll up a newspaper and give a good whack to all those doe-eyed mothers stupidly crooning to their charges. Actually, part of my prejudice to this most bizarre children’s ditty can be traced to my own infancy. I was in the orchard with some older cousins and they stuck me in the branch of a tree. Why, I still don’t know. Perhaps to test gravity. In my case, it worked. I was about 18 months old and can still remember that innocent rush of air before I hit the ground. I broke my collar bone and was in a body cast for months. In the case of “Rock-a-bye Baby,” I am living proof life imitates art. Still. What a wacky thing to sing to a kid. Besides being in violation of about 1,406 OSHA violations, the nursery rhyme seeks to plant all manner of disdainful seeds. What is the author trying to tell us? You can’t trust your parents because they’re trying to kill you? Or how about this for another valuable life’s lesson: Never Let Your Guard Down. Perhaps the theme is don’t try to reach high for your goals because you’ll end up crashing and being a miserable, disfigured failure. The baby’s song also seems to send the contradictory message that parents want you to go to sleep, but if you do, you’ll die. Maybe it’s just a foreshadowing of our debt-ridden, condo-dwelling over-achieving treadmill sprint lifestyle the kids have to look forward to just around the corner. It seems bloody ghoulish to me. Really, I can’t think of one positive thing about “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Are we telling children at an early age that just when you think you’ve got it figured out and can relax, the floor collapses. Maybe it’s one of those planted fables by the insurance industry to make sure we grow up expecting natural disasters and over-insure ourselves. I didn’t finish reading “Feathers and Fools” to Indy. I thumbed ahead and the following pages, on the bright side, were a less bloody. Two eggs were left and you guessed it. A baby swan and a baby peacock were born. They celebrated their similarities and became friends. The author failed to mention they were the last of their species facing the yawning abyss of impending extinction. Or perhaps they mated and created an entire new creature, the peawan. This seems a tale best told when Indiana is say, 16, and comes home after 9:30 from her date. “Well, my darling daughter,” I will tell her. “For your punishment, I’m afraid I’m going to have to read to you this thinly-disguised children’s fable about one world government and the disarmament of America so it can be eventually run by bureaucrats and mincing wimpy leftist elitists.” But, I’m guessing by the time Indy turns 16, she would have already read “Animal Farm.”
o o o o o o o o o o o o John Boston hosts a weekly radio show called "The Former Friends of John Boston" on KHTS-AM 1220. Visit www.hometownstation.com and do a search for John Boston. You can listen to his show Mondays at 2 p.m. or pick up any of the webcasts. © Copyright 2009 by John Boston. All rights reserved.
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