The Sehnsucht of the 1980 Strawberry Shortcake Theme Song

My 4-year-old daughter has liked Strawberry Shortcake (in her modern incarnation) for a long time, but recently she has also discovered the classic 1980s version--which I explained to her was "the old Strawberry Shortcake"--and now enjoys watching those cartoons as well. My sister used to watch the original show back in the early '80s, and, although I can still recall a couple of songs from it, the theme song of the original special, The World of Strawberry Shortcake (1980), did not definitely sound familiar to me when I first watched it with my daughter the other day. It did, however, rather charm me, and I have found myself, at times when I am home alone, looking up the song on YouTube:

 

The song initially won me with its simple, bright happiness, which my daughter seemed to enjoy as well. After hearing it a few times, however, I noticed that this little children's ditty began to have quite a different emotional effect upon me. It was not the emotional reaction I would have expected in response to a cheery, bouncy theme song for an old children's TV show. Strange as it may sound, I actually find the song deeply moving. In fact, it can almost bring tears to my eyes.

It is difficult to understand this reaction, let alone explain it. It is hard even to define exactly what the deep emotion is that the song arouses in me. I cannot chalk it up to simple nostalgia since, as I mentioned, I do not distinctly remember it from my own childhood. It is true that even items I do not specifically remember may sometimes produce nostalgic feelings in me because they evoke the era of my childhood and bring back a bittersweet taste of that lost world. In this case, however, the nostalgia factor seems relatively small. I must look elsewhere for an explanation of my strangely profound emotional response to what seems such a slight item of children's entertainment.

Though it is not really an explanation, I do at least have a word for it (thanks to German, as there is no real equivalent in English): Sehnsucht. This is an emotion I have discussed on this blog before, and it figures prominently in my literary work, particularly in The Bluebird of Happiness and Rainbow. In my essay on Gen X I defined it this way:

the realm of bittersweetness, of inexpressible longing, ... what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a deep and aching yearning for who knows what--something we can't name or describe, but a longing which we nevertheless feel viscerally and painfully. 

This quite accurately describes how the old Strawberry Shortcake theme song makes me feel, so that is how I identify the emotion as Sehnsucht. It is not sadness, exactly, though it certainly contains sadness within it. In fact, it has a touch of grief. It is almost as though I am longing for a long lost loved one and wishing they could come back just for one day. It is a deep, aching warmth that can easily well up into silent tears.

But it is more than just a sad longing. There is a subtle joy to it as well--an equally warm sensitivity to life, a softening of the heart, a quiet sense of wonder at the world--perhaps even something like gratitude. While listening to the song, and afterward as it replays in my mind, I somehow feel more alive, suddenly more aware of the preciousness and the beauty of things. The emotion even has a moral effect too, for it makes me want (even more than usual) to be a good person and to treat everybody with love and kindness and empathy.

Such effects show, I would think, that this is a healthy emotion. Even grief is healthy and natural, and may be considered a form of celebration (since, by grieving, we acknowledge and proclaim the worth of the lost person or thing). But in this case, as with Sehnsucht in general, what exactly it is for which the heart yearns--that which it grieves, celebrates, and is inspired by--is difficult to discern and remains a mystery.

The things that trigger Sehnsucht are seemingly random, often even trivial. On the surface of it, they may appear to be rather unlikely sources of profound emotion. But Sehnsucht is often a highly personal and subjective phenomenon. While some triggers (such as the sight of the ocean, or a sunset, perhaps) may seem quite understandable to most people, others may appear entirely inexplicable and even slightly absurd as instigators of deep longing (like, say, the Strawberry Shortcake theme song).

In any case, my recent experience of being so profoundly moved by a happy little children's song dovetails with my blog post earlier this week, particularly with respect to the significance of the title Rainbow. I have been coming to see more and more of late how the novel's title is rather perfect, despite the fact that it was originally meant only as a working title. It did not occur to me at first that I might actually call a serious work of literary fiction Rainbow.

But, quite unintentionally on my part, that one-word title, in its childlike simplicity, turned out to be quite well suited to the novel's protagonist, Martin Lane. Martin's art is all about taking things that seem childish, trivial, silly, or kitschy, and, by his own unique creative alchemy, transforming these unpromising ingredients into something quite beautiful, moving, and profound. His art, like mine, is play: as I put it last time, "[t]he kind of serious and sacred play that celebrates the mystery of existence, that joins the significance of the lowest and humblest things to the highest and the greatest."

I don't know if I realized it when I wrote it, but that is actually a pretty good description of what the emotion of Sehnsucht accomplishes as well. It is hard to imagine something much humbler than a children's song; yet equally hard to imagine being more deeply moved by a work of art. Unbelievably, yet wonderfully, the effect the Strawberry Shortcake theme song has upon me is almost akin to the cathartic, rain-washed freshness of feeling, the ennobling sensation of tenderheartedness, that I experience after I have finished writing, reading, or viewing a tragedy: akin, in fact, after the dark storm has passed, to the sight of the rainbow.

Why I Will Allow My Daughter To Be A Princess

Athena, daughter of Zeus

and goddess of wisdom

My daughter is three and has, without prompting from her parents, and like so many other little girls in 21st century America, enthusiastically embraced the quasi-medieval imagery and fairy-tale identity of the "princess". This is far from being her only interest—she is also, much to her father's delight, fascinated by dinosaurs and space, enjoys watching my old Superfriends and Planet of the Apes cartoons on DVD, likes scary things, and loves books (most of them having nothing to do with princesses)—but princesses are nevertheless a major preoccupation at this early stage of her life.

I am of course aware of the socially and politically charged debate surrounding the popularity of the princess motif among young girls today, and, being a father who wants to see my daughter grow up to be all that she can be, without any artificial and unnecessary limitations, I sympathize with the concerns of those who see the entire princess notion as instilling unhealthy conceptions about femininity, love, and life in the still tender and forming minds of these glitter-eyed little girls.

I, too, am a little put off by the kitschy and overly sentimentalized Disney image of a princess, and, at the very least, as my daughter grows in years and understanding (and assuming the fascination lasts, which it may not), I will want to guide her toward a healthy and realistic understanding about the meaning of the princess symbolism and how it relates (or does not relate) to herself as a girl and future woman who lives in, well, 21st century America, rather than a fantasy version of medieval Europe that never existed outside of fairy tales and romances.

But, despite whatever cautions my mind might throw up, at base I have no problem with my daughter—the daughter who I very much want to grow up into an intelligent, independent, and strong woman—being fascinated by and identifying with the image of the fairy tale princess.

Why not? Why am I not concerned that continued identification with and influence by the Disney princess myth will permanently warp my daughter's sense of who she is as a female, of the way life and relationships work, and of what a woman can be?

Well, the answer boils down to one word, a quality in which children almost invariably surpass their grown-up counterparts: imagination.

I think it is crucial to understand that children are not adults. This may seem obvious, but it is a fact that adults so often seem to forget. Children do not think like us. They do not carry with them our concepts, particularly our social and political ideas, and they do not share our adult understanding of the world. Children do not see the world with the same eyes by which grown-ups see the world.

Because of this, children, and especially young children who have as yet received relatively little in the way of socialization and enculturation, do not see princesses, for example, the way adults see princesses. It is important to understand this, because it helps to illuminate the fact that a little girl is not necessarily seeing in a princess what we might see in a princess.

In other words, while you, the sophisticated grown-up, may see the princess as a fragile, infantilized, and impossibly idealized distortion of a woman, that little girl, watching Cinderella in wide-eyed delight, is seeing something entirely different—and something infinitely more interesting.

That is because, unlike most adults, the child has imagination. The child has not yet been indoctrinated to think that such things as fragile, infantilized, impossibly idealized distortions of women might even possibly exist. Therefore, the child's imagination is free and empowered to see that very same princess as something wondrous, beautiful, and extraordinary—a true ideal to which a little girl's heart might aspire. The ideal is not what you think it is, because you are thinking with the mind of an adult. The child is thinking with the far richer mind of a child.

It would be impossible, and perhaps even undesirable, to attempt to explain exactly what that ideal is, or what exactly my daughter is seeing when she sees Cinderella, or Ariel, or Aurora, or Snow White, or Jasmine (who, despite obvious differences in skin tone, is one of my Anglo daughter's favorites), or any of the other princesses who populate the Disney princess pantheon. That is because I do not know what she is seeing, and I do not pretend to know. I am an adult, and, even as much as I might pride myself on my imaginative powers as a poet, I do not claim to have quite the Promethean power of imagination that is the natural and rightful possession of children—especially the youngest among them.

But I do know—partly from my own infrequent, fleeting, but powerful moments of remembering the way I saw the world as a child (memories that remain one of the sources of whatever poetic power I might possess), and partly from an intuitive intimation, though only a hint, of my daughter's way of experiencing the world—that this little girl is seeing something far more wonderful, magical, and glorious when she sees a princess than anything most adults are capable of comprehending.

The adult urge to control and resist the princess mythology—even if understandable from an adult point of view—can all too easily devolve into just another version of Victorian moralistic repression. When premised on adult perceptions and conceptions, and based on misunderstanding of the child and of child psychology, it becomes, in fact, a well-intended effort that is actually detrimental to the child's development—or, to put it in plainer and more meaningful language: it is damaging to the child's soul.

If you think this sounds too harsh, allow me to explain. When my daughter sees Cinderella, I do not know exactly what she sees. But I know enough to know that she is not seeing what I am seeing. A 43-year-old man, no matter how imaginative, cannot possibly see a princess the same way that a 3-year-old girl sees a princess. And, from my daughter's fascination and joy, I know that she is seeing something that makes her happy, something beautiful and good and true, something wonderful and magical and alive.

My daughter's mind has not yet been corrupted by the boring adult modes of thought that would read political and social significance into the princess image. However true and valid those critiques might be, they do not exist for her. She is too busy seeing glitter and magic and wonder. She is seeing something that inspires and uplifts her sweet and beautiful heart and that opens her young and tender mind to new realms of possibility and hope. And it would be cruel, blind, and selfish for any grown-up to attempt to stamp that out in the name of a misguided and myopic moralism.

As she gets older, assuming the princess fascination endures, I will do my best to place alongside that fascination other experiences and ideas that will help provide her with a broad, full, rich spectrum of all the possibilities that are open to her as a young woman. I will teach her to think critically and to ask healthy and productive questions about the values her society teaches her, to value and respect herself, to believe in herself as a woman and as a human being, and to instill in her the faith that she is capable of doing and being whatever she wants to do and to be, according to her own natural talents and native interests, not according to someone else's stereotypes or false limitations. I will accept, support, and love her whoever she is, whatever she does, whoever she loves, whatever she believes.

But I will never tell my daughter she cannot be a princess.

Of course, as she grows older, she will come to have a more realistic understanding of what a princess is, in both fiction and reality. And, as an American woman of the 21st century, it is exceedingly unlikely that she will become a real-life princess, literally speaking.

That may sound ridiculously obvious, but it should underscore my point. Little girls today are not in danger of becoming actual princesses. (I would dare say that the looming possibility of becoming a fairy tale princess is the least problem confronting young women today.) Yes, it is true that they may be in danger of adopting self-images and expectations about life and relationships that are neither realistic nor healthy, and that this is the real threat posed by the ubiquitous princess mythology. 


But, at least at this early stage of my daughter's life, the princess image is more likely—far more likely—to instill in her tender young mind ideas, aspirations, and dreams that are nothing but healthy and productive, and I would never want to stand in the way of that.


I will certainly not quash the bright-eyed vision of my daughter's heart because of some completely distorted and prejudiced (and entirely adult) concept of what it is that she is so attracted to in the princess mythology. I may not be able to say exactly what that little girl is imagining in her mind when she watches a princess movie, or what she imagines herself to be when she wears a princess dress, but I can tell you this: it is not what we are imagining a princess to be.


If we see in the princess a fragile, disempowered, and dumbed-down being, she sees something more like a goddess. As adults, we may not be able to share the child's vision of the princess, but we can at least acknowledge our own ignorance and the child's innate genius for perceiving the world, including princesses, through the eyes of wonder.

The ancient philosophers believed that philosophy begins in wonder. So do science and art. Each of these are avenues of knowing and understanding the world, life, and ourselves, and of finding our way toward truth and, ultimately, wisdom. To repress a child's sense of wonder because we mistakenly believe the object of that wonder to be somehow morally corrupting even when it is having precisely the opposite effect is to harm the child's development as a fully realized human being.


Perhaps, instead of complacently accepting our own narrow ideas about what a princess is—instead of passively accepting what Disney tells us a princess is—it would be more productive, more helpful to little girls, to let them teach us what a princess is. Perhaps if we could find the means to turn off the noise of our own political, intellectual, and moral sensibilities for just a moment, and really sit quietly and watch and listen while our daughters and nieces and granddaughters beam with delight at a princess movie, or witness the way they feel themselves to be—how, in their own mind, they are—a magical being when they put on a chintzy princess costume, we might learn something. Perhaps we might learn to expand our own horizons, to stretch our own imaginations, to consider that a princess—just possibly, just maybe—might be an intelligent, wise, powerful, creative, generous, and noble human being. Who just happens to be female. Perhaps, if we cannot conceive of a princess who matches a "prince" in all of the latter's admirable qualities and connotations, it is we who have the problem.


I for one would rather expose my daughter, over the years, to a wide variety of narratives, from many cultures and time periods, both fictional and historical, and thereby help her develop a broad, open-minded, and well-rounded view of what it means to be a woman—and, even more importantly, what it means to be a human. I will not just thoughtlessly accept the dominant 21st century American narrative about princesses (which, for better or worse, has become almost synonymous with the Disney version), either to unquestioningly accept it or to confusedly and misguidedly reject it outright.


I will instead, to the best of my ability, attempt to understand what it is that my beautiful daughter loves so much about princesses. I will not assume that I know more than she does in areas where she, as a child, is the expert. I will not impose my own adult ideas and perceptions onto her bright new mind, still unfettered in imagination and unprejudiced by anyone's politics, right or left. I will allow her to be a princess—whatever that is, whatever that means to her.


Because, although I don't really know what my daughter thinks a princess is, I know this much: it is something wonderful, and beautiful, and good—just like her.

 

 

The Lazy Scarecrow: Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Earth was filled with craters.

After a few years, Taylor told Clondike and Fugerson that a great fireball was scheduled to pass by Earth.

"I'm leaving," said Clondike. "It might crash."

"There's no chance of that," said Fugerson.

All of a sudden, a fireball came soaring downward. Taylor and Fugerson ran for the ship that they now caught fish in.

Clondike was looking at the fireball coming toward him.

The ship holding Taylor and Fugerson went toward the moon. Then, they went to Mars.

They saw the fireball crash, then Earth exploded, into pebble-sized pieces.

Then, the rocks formed a ring around the moon, and the moon went into Earth's orbit.

The Lazy Scarecrow 5: The End of the World

The End of the World

An age of ghosts had ended, and an earthling ship landed in the ocean.

"Hey," said one of the astronauts. "This is Cape Canaverel?"

"Remember that band of light we went through? It must have been a time warp," said another, whose name was Fugerson.

The other man, named Clondike, said, "We left in the 4000s. It looks like Florida has sunk."

A piece of land appeared in the distance. A man was on it, waving.

When the spaceship reached land, the man told them he was a foodmaker, and his named was Taylor.

"What year is it?" said Clondike.

Taylor said, "1,000,210 A.D."

"What? It must have been a time warp."

*

Next: Epilogue

The Lazy Scarecrow 4: Expedition—Mars to Earth

Expedition—Mars to Earth

The martians, by the year 9876, had taken over Earth.

A jungle was grown in a part of North America. The west was a dry desert. In the east, a forest had covered the north. The southeast was sunk under water.

In a place where the jungle met the desert, a martian named El Tula Ti lived in his white, ball-shaped house.

One day, El went to the automatic foodmaker, and got a ham and cheese sandwich.

He went to the jungle area to eat it.

Suddenly, a strange person grabbed him. El asked him, "Who are you?"

He answered, "An earthling. My spaceship crashlanded over by the lake. We were exploring the moonbase's secret slab whenever we came to our ship. It went wild, then crashed."

"Where are the others?"

"I'm the only one--wait, four more survived. There was 25 of us."

"Okay. Come with me. I'll take you to my ship."

The five earthlings followed the martian to his house.

Then, El got in. He drove away without them, leaving them in the middle of the desert.

*

Next: The End of the World

The Lazy Scarecrow 3: Last People on Earth

Last People on Earth

One day a bomb tester accidently dropped a bomb on Manhattan. The enemy from France started bombing New York City. But some Russian planes tried to attack. There was nuclear explosions from New York City to Philadelphia.

People went wild on the streets below. Nearly 10,000 died in one day. At night Russian spies walked over the city. An attack troop started shooting at them.

Contaminated people were walking on the streets. Some furred men went underground.

A pair of tan men came out of the forest. A man saw them. "Stick up your hands," they said as they pointed wierd lasers at him.

"We are from Mars," one said. "You are the last person on Earth."

"Come with us."

He said, "No."

They shot him and nobody else was ever born on Earth again.

*

Next:  Expedition—Mars to Earth

The Lazy Scarecrow 2: The Great Rocket Ride

 

The Great Rocket Ride

 

 

Suddenly it got real hot. It felt like the sun was coming to the earth. At Billy's house he saw the sun coming. He ran to his mom and then the earth was burnt up. Birds flew away and alligators drowned themselves.

 

The farmer's son ran out of the house to get his little globe that was being burnt in the bonfire outside. He threw it back in because it was too hot. That weekend he bought a new one. On the globe little dinosaurs were walking around.

 

He picked off the dinosaurs and ran to eat supper.

 

The next day he went to Cape Cernelaverlel. He got on a seat and it started moving. He went into a Malcon D-4 hole. He went through the darkness and came to a staircase. He started to go up the long ladder. He went real slow until he got to the top. Then he went three trillion worlds a second. Finally he stopped. He was standing by a rocket. It said "Leskrypton". He walked around the 100-foot long rocket. He wished he could take a ride in it.

 

His mother told him it was time to go. He wanted to take a picture of the tall, towerlike UFO. He told his mother.

 

She told him no. They walked into a canlike building. There they saw a man. "Welcome to the rocket," he said.

 

Some men with rifles came into the room. One said, "We are the hypnotizers." He shot them with his rifle. They fell into a deep sleep.

 

When they woke up, they were preserved in ice.

 

On Earth, people never saw the rocket again, after it had taken off.

 

* 

 

Next: Last People on Earth

 

The Lazy Scarecrow 1: The Lazy Scarecrow

The Lazy Scarecrow

In the year 2000 A.D. the world was filled with craters because of light speed meteors. The Galactic Empire, Bill Vader, had been sending them since 1990. Once a farmer let a meteor kill his corn, because bugs had attacked it. He built a scarecrow and then his house and city got killed by a very large meteor. The scarecrow was tired and wanted to know what had happened to his farmer.

One day the last and largest meteor of all fell on North America. The sun was turning red now. The oceans boiled up. The year 2000 passed and the lazy scarecrow was still looking for the farmer.

At dusk the scarecrow found a pile of bones on a rock and fit them together. They reminded him of a person, so he stood it up and tried to walk with it. But it fell to the ground and the bones crumbled up. The scarecrow went on to see if he could find the farmer.

The next day the scarecrow woke up at noon and found himself on a beach. An old sign off the road said 'Del Rio Beach is 4 miles away.' The scarecrow knew that Del Rio Beach is in El Salvador, so he knew that that was where he was.

He walked into stones and ruins and said "I must be in Del Rio." He went on into Nicaragua and passed by a ruined city. It seemed like this used to be Ancient Greece.

A few days later he came to a crumpling sign that said 'Welcome to Panama'. He saw a large crow fly over. He jumped up and caught the crow. He hadn't eaten for days, so he ate the crow after he cooked it. He went on and on until he fell into a small hole. He climbed out and walked through a jungle. He had to swim across a creek and into a thicker jungle. Now the highway had turned into a small road. Suddenly a monkey jumped down at him. He took out some hay and ate it. The scarecrow strangled the monkey and forgot why he was walking. He ate the monkey for breakfast. He went over the Amazon on a rope bridge and over the Rio Tapajos on an Alligator. The alligator ate the Scarecrow.

*

Next: The Great Rocket Ride
 

The Lazy Scarecrow: Introduction & Prologue

One of my earliest surviving works of fiction is contained in a slim clothbound book titled The Lazy Scarecrow. I wrote it for a school assignment in 4th grade. Once a week a few of my schoolmates and I rode a bus to a place called the Learning Center, as part of the gifted student program. Each student in the program took three courses at the Learning Center during one semester of the school year, and one of the courses I chose was Creative Writing. The major project for the semester was to write your own story, which would be bound into a book.

I had been writing stories for as long as I knew how to write (since kindergarten), so this was a class and a project that I particularly enjoyed. We were given a list of basic story premises to choose from. The one I selected was a simple enough idea: Write a story about a lazy scarecrow.

Now, most students would probably have done the sensible thing and written a story about... well, a lazy scarecrow. You know, a scarecrow that some farmer puts in his field to scare the crows away, only the scarecrow is too darn lazy to do his job. And maybe how he learns not to be so lazy and how important his job is in protecting the farmer's valuable crops from those pesky crows. It seems unnecessary to explain it as I just did, but I do so to illustrate that this is not at all the story line I came up with. Not by a long shot.

One of my goals and constant challenges as a writer is to be half as creative and imaginative as I was as a child. What I did with this very simple story idea was to take it and transform it into some kind of apocalyptic science fiction epic. That was just how my mind worked, I guess. That kind of wild and unfettered imagination just came naturally to me as a child. It was certainly not the first time I had accomplished such a work of creative transformation of a simple and homey concept. A few years earlier, I would sometimes agree to play "house" with my kid sister, but I ended up turning the erstwhile domestic narrative (at least in my own mind) into... you guessed it... a science fiction epic. (In fact, that childhood fantasy later became the seed of one of my major fiction ideas in adulthood, for an as-yet-to-be-written novel.)

I began writing my lazy scarecrow story in the fall of 1980, and completed it at the end of the semester in January 1981. When the last day of class started, I had not yet completed the story, though I had written much of the draft. One of my classmates and/or the teacher (likely, both working together) had created the actual physical book, which basically consisted of two pieces of cardboard covered by cloth with an appropriately autumnal orange and brown pattern (see photo below). Inside were six sheets of light orange paper, on which I was to write and illustrate my opus.

The 12 pages consist of a title page (see photo at top), a "Prologue", five short stories (or chapters), and an "Epilogue". The stories were supposed to be loosely related, each story an episode in the same future history, stretching from "the year 2000 A.D." to (literally) the end of the world about a million years hence.

As I mentioned, when the last class started, I had not yet finished writing my great work. Actually, when the last class ended, I had still not finished it. When I left the classroom that day, I had committed the first two stories, or chapters, to the orange pages of the book. I had written quite a bit beyond that, though, on other sheets of paper. I believe I must have written the initial draft on those other sheets, then started transcribing my text into the book once it had been put together. However, I did not manage to transcribe the entire text before the last class was over.

While in the classroom, I used a variety of colored pencils to write the text of the book. I can tell exactly where I left off at the end of class that day because at the end of chapter two, the colored pencil stops, and the rest of the book (including the illustration at the bottom of that page) is in regular old gray pencil. (The title page and prologue are also in gray pencil.)

What happened was this: I left the text I had written on the loose sheets with the teacher, who used it to give me a grade for the course (if I remember correctly, I got an A). Then, riding the bus back to my elementary school, I took one of my regular pencils and continued adding words and pictures to the bound book, filling up the remaining pages with three additional chapters/stories, an epilogue, and accompanying illustrations. By the end of the day, I had filled up the book, and The Lazy Scarecrow was complete.

The curious thing is that the text I wrote after leaving class that day is, almost necessarily, not the same as the text I handed in to the teacher (except of course for the first two chapters). I only have a vague idea now as to what the remainder of the original story was like. I recall enough, however, to know that the text of the book, while it has some similarities to the original text, is quite different. Except for the first two chapters, the original text of The Lazy Scarecrow (which I believe was left incomplete) is among the many lost works of my childhood, which far outnumber the few that have survived.

In any case, the surviving work--which is of course the "official" text since it is what I committed to the pages of the book, even though the teacher never got to read the completed work--has remained a source of delight and inspiration to me well into adulthood. Just for example, in 2002 I recorded myself reading the story, set to a musical score that I performed on my synthesizer; in 2006, I named my first blog after the book (that blog no longer exists, though I saved a number of the best posts). 

However, until now, I have never shared this childhood opus with anyone beyond a few friends and family members. And so here, now, I present the first publication of The Lazy Scarecrow, to be presented one chapter at a time (starting today with the prologue). This first edition will present only the text. I would like to scan the drawings for a subsequent online edition, but that will have to wait... for the future.

***

The Lazy Scarecrow

PROLOGUE

A very angry galactic empire, named Bill Vader, started sending meteors to Earth.

A farmer got so angry because of this. He told his son to grow enough corn to last a century.

But in 1998, bugs started to attack it. So the farmer told the empire to throw a large meteor on the field.

So the empire did it, and the farmer got real angry.

***

Next: The Lazy Scarecrow

Thoughts on Being a Parent

You may have heard about a recent study that purported to show that having children does not make people happier. Besides the usual reservations I might have about the validity of the "knowledge" that is supposedly delivered to us by studies of this sort, I have some especially strong reasons to be skeptical of this particular study's conclusions.

One reason is the subject: happiness. Philosophers have debated the nature of happiness for centuries, and there is no universally accepted definition of what it even is. The authors of this study, therefore, had to define "happiness" in some particular way. In other words, they had to start out with an assumption about what "happiness" is, and therefore their results are, from the very start, colored by their chosen definition. (Either that or they had no definition, which is a different sort of problem.)

Another reason for skepticism is the rather obvious fact that what makes one person happy does not necessarily make another person happy. This is why we have common expressions like "to each his own".

Even more importantly, however, there is an unexamined presupposition underlying the idea that "parenthood does not make people happy": namely, the assumption that "happiness" (however defined) is the reason that people choose to become parents. This is a gross oversimplification at best, a straw man at worst.

I will address that more later, but first I want to give the most important reason of all why I do not place any stock in such conclusions: my own personal experience of being a parent.

I did not become a parent until I was 40. For most of my life up until then, I had little if any desire to have children of my own. It was not until after I married, at the age of 34, that I even began to contemplate, with any seriousness, the idea of becoming a father.

It is hard to say why, exactly, I became open to the idea, or why I eventually chose to take that step. As a single man, I had always liked children, but did not particularly care if I ever had any of my own. However, even though parenthood had been a rather low priority for me for most of my adult life, something about the idea of having a child had, at the same time, always been appealing. I sometimes imagined, in particular, having a daughter, but it was more in the realm of a passing fancy than a wholehearted dream.

In any case, the reason I eventually chose to become a parent is not something I could reduce to "I wanted to be happy (or happier)". I had no doubt, based on what I knew of other parents' experience and feelings, that it would most likely create a great deal of happiness, as well as a great deal of heartache. But I was under no illusion that parenthood was a path to unalloyed happiness. And that was certainly not the reason, the deciding factor, that caused me to make my decision.

Ultimately, as with many important life choices, it is difficult to explain or understand our reasons for desiring or choosing what we do. We may have a rational explanation, but more often than not, however true that explanation may be, it is only partial, and perhaps not even the greater part of the truth. Our motives are often obscure even to ourselves, driven as we are by deep and mysterious forces of biology and psychology. (For this reason alone, I should point out, the notion that we choose parenthood--or anything else--in order to be "happy" is highly suspect.)

Whatever my motives or reasons, exactly two weeks after hitting forty, I greeted a new human being, a human being that had never before existed and would never come into being again, which I had somehow helped bring into existence. (Yes, of course I know how... but only from a physical point of view. From a metaphysical and experiential point of view, it remains, to all of us, utterly mysterious.)

I did indeed feel blissfully happy upon the arrival of my daughter. Even though she was so new and so small, she was very much a real, particular, unique human being to me. She was someone. Someone that I, as immediately and mysteriously as her sudden appearance from nothing, deeply and profoundly loved.

My daughter is now three and splits her time between two homes. As a single father who works full time and spends a great deal of his off time living with and taking care of a small child, I can assure you that it can be draining. It can be frustrating to the point of infuriating. It can be anything but conducive to an unfettered life of seeking one's own pleasure. And yes, sometimes it can feel like an act of (not entirely willed) self-sacrifice.

But I can also tell you this: I wouldn't trade it for anything. What makes any effort, any sacrifice, worth it is the thing for which one is exerting that effort or making that sacrifice. It is entirely a question of worth. And the worth in question, in the case of parenthood, is decidedly not one's own happiness.

This is not to say--not by a long shot--that my daughter does not bring me happiness. On the contrary, she is one of the greatest sources of joy, and one of the deepest sources of satisfaction and fulfillment, that I have ever had the fortune to be graced with. The happiness she brings me does include abundant amounts of fun and laughter and play and affection, but it is far more than just that. It is much deeper than that. It would be very difficult to explain just what that happiness is, but it is very real, and very deep.

And sometimes that happiness hurts. That may sound very strange, self-contradictory, but not if you take a deeper view of what happiness is. As I mentioned at the beginning, philosophers have speculated about the nature of happiness for centuries; and, although they have not come to any universal agreement about what constitutes it, or the best path by which to attain it, a philosophical view of happiness is not a superficial view. It goes well beyond feelings of pleasure or "happy" emotions. It is, if anything, a state of being. You might say it is a state of being right (not in the sense of argument, but in the sense of, "yes, this is right").

And yet... even if my daughter brought me none of these joys... even if she caused me great woe... I would not regret having brought her into the world. And that points to what is perhaps the most profound reason why studies purporting to show that "parenthood does not equal happiness" are entirely irrelevant. It is not so much because they provide spurious answers as because they ask the wrong questions.

As I said, our reasons for making life choices are ultimately shrouded in the mysteries of our unconscious. Anyone's reason for choosing to have children can surely be traced, at least to a very large degree, simply to Mother Nature and her imperative to her creatures to keep making more of themselves. We may think of ourselves as rationally acting individuals as much as we like, but the truth remains that we are also, and perhaps to a much more significant degree, determined by forces greater than ourselves.

This idea may sound threatening to our modern Western ears, to we who have been trained to embrace the idea of personal freedom above all else, but it need not. It is merely to assert that we are part of nature, part of the universe. We are not separate, completely self-determined atoms but intimately and intricately interconnected parts of a great, magnificent, and mysterious Whole. We did not determine our own being and our own existence, and can only exercise feeble and faltering control over our ultimate fate.

But despite these rather humbling circumstances, we also have the great honor of participating in the grand project of life. We can do this in many ways, of course, not limited to creating more life; we can, for instance, work to improve the lives of others by various means, from social work that alleviates material suffering to making art that enriches spiritual existence, as well as a host of other worthy activities.

And it is precisely this identification with, this commitment to, the larger whole--this expansion of one's interest outside of oneself--that (most philosophers and religions would agree in teaching us) constitute the good life... the life worth living... true happiness.

Because, when it comes down to it, our happiness does not consist in seeking our own happiness (which tends to be, ironically, a self-defeating pursuit), but in realizing that we are members of a larger world, and that we are fulfilled, not by self-seeking separation from, but by self-contributing connection to, the larger whole of which we are small but significant parts.

And that is why questions about any particular activity making one "happy" are completely beside the point, at least if we are considering happiness in anything other than a fleeting and superficial emotional context. If we are, on the other hand, considering happiness from a philosophical perspective, we must look at a whole life, well lived--what constitutes it, and how we might best attain it. Philosophers may disagree on the specific answer, but they tend to ask the same general question.

Ultimately, I do not know why I opened myself up to having a child. It is, on the surface of it, one of the scariest things a human being can possibly choose to do. It is one of the most tremendous risks a human heart can take on. It is, on one level, from the perspective of individual happiness, entirely irrational.

But billions of people have done it, and continue to do it, and will continue to do it (we can only hope; if they stop, then we stop too). And most of them appear to sail with sublime serenity into what is undoubtedly a tremendously fraught and terrifying project for anyone with a soul to undertake. Despite the extraordinary risks, challenges, and costs of being a parent, it cannot be said that there is anything particularly heroic about choosing to become one. As I have stated, it is largely the dictates of Mother Nature, directing us at our deepest biological levels (something that goes well beyond mere sex drive) to Keep Making More Like You.

But parenthood, at least for the vast majority of parents, does help to expand us beyond ourselves. This does not mean it makes us morally better than non-parents. It is more often than not a self-expansion that is forced ever so painfully upon us rather than something we magnanimously and cheerfully choose to endure. And it is certainly not the only way that human beings may experience self-expansion. But it is certainly, usually, one of them.

And so, in the end, the value of parenthood cannot be reduced to the question: "Do I feel happy at this particular moment?" If that were the case, there would be quite a few moments when I would have to say: no, this is definitely not making me happy. But jobs and careers can do that too. Sexual relationships can do that. Sometimes, food can do that. But we do not forego those things just because they might cause us some pain or discomfort along the way.

Certainly, parenthood is not necessary to be a complete human being, or to be a good human being, or to be a human being who makes a valuable contribution to the world. One only need consider, for example, Mother Theresa to see that. But it is also far from the truth to say that parenthood makes people less happy.

For many, I would dare say most, of those who, for whatever inscrutable reasons, undertake this most daunting of human projects, it is--despite the pains; despite the frustrations; despite the uncertainties and worries and doubts; despite the fears and anxieties; despite the disappointments and heartaches; despite the exhaustion, the loss of free time, the million little and thousand large sacrifices--it is still, somehow, miraculously, one of the greatest sources of happiness it is possible to know.

It could only be such a source if it were something that expanded us beyond ourselves... beyond the narrow bubble of seeking one's own pleasure and comfort above all else. And parenthood, if practiced in anything resembling a healthy and proper way, is guaranteed to do just that (it will definitely take you outside the bubble of pleasure and comfort).

Don't get me wrong. Bad people become parents and remain bad people; good people choose not to have children. But parenthood has a way--a particularly annoying and painful way at very many times--of finding our hidden reserves of generosity, of patience, of forgiveness, of love--and wresting them out of us, often surprising and amazing (and yet, deeply humbling) ourselves.

No one is a perfect parent, and I certainly am not. Guilt and self-doubt are horribly familiar to any parent with even a shred of conscience. Few of us sit around admiring our fine moral standing. It is all too easy to feel that one has instead been revealed to be a depraved and cruel human being, not a noble and saintly one.

But through it all, through all the ashes of our own weaknesses and failures, the nobility that is inherent in us as human beings may sometimes shine through. We may learn that we were capable of loving another human being in ways we had not imagined ourselves to be (or even imagined at all, for that matter).

What it comes down to, ultimately, is this: the value of parenthood is not in what it does for the parent (although it does, incidentally, provide many goods for those who choose this vocation). The value of parenthood is in what it does for the child. Any good parent knows this. The question of whether it makes me happy, in this case, is entirely irrelevant.

And that is because, in the last analysis, parenthood is not pursued for one's own sake. It is pursued precisely for someone else's sake. This may sound paradoxical, considering that one cannot do something for the sake of someone who does not yet exist--and I am not claiming that aspiring parents do not choose it, at least in part, out of a belief that it will bring them a certain type of happiness and fulfillment--but it is, taken as a whole, a project that can only possibly pay off, and be worthwhile, for the sake of the child.

For a parent, the child's good, the child's fulfillment, the child's happiness--these are what matter. These are what define the worth of the parental endeavor. And, again paradoxically, in that very act of other-focused, self-sacrificing action (which is certainly not all of a parent's life, though it can sometimes feel that way), one may find a type of happiness that is far deeper and more profound than life's more ephemeral pleasures.

Yes, sometimes--at moments when I feel completely unraveled, exhausted, bewildered--it is easy to ask what I got myself into. Was it really worth all this blood? The continued, seemingly endless bleeding that somehow coexists with sweetness and light? The bleeding that you know, deep down, will never end... not for as long as you remain alive on this earth? Was it really worth it?

And then I look into my daughter's bright and hopeful and innocent eyes, or hear her sweet and tender voice. And in those moments, I know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the answer to the question cannot be anything other than a quiet, humbled, and broken, yet vast, deep, and resounding: yes. It is worth every last, glorious, painful drop.

The Future People

Below is another story I wrote in 4th grade, this one for a school assignment. I believe it was written sometime in the spring of 1981.

*

The Future People


Monday

I first got into my time machine at noon. I began the controls. I became real dizzy. The Time Machine seemed to fall over. I stopped the control dial.

It read 3 PM. But the Time Machine did go into the future! So I turned the dial again.

The days went by. In 1989 a rocket to Mars went up. In 1992 I saw large blueish-white tanks holding water. A large hurricane was over part of South America. In 1999 a space shuttle went up to give fuel to a space station. Then everything was red.

In the twenty-first century some apes were in a space station, working with people.

My time machine was going at the speed of light. It was 300 feet up and it would land back at my house where I went up.

By 2150 there was a nuclear war in America. It ended and a new city was built in space. It was red. Mutants walked in it. The Washington monument was 1 inch high. The tower of Pisa was on the ground. I stopped the time machine. Seven landing arms touched the ground. They pulled me to the ground and shot out blue globes of water in every direction. The year-reader read 3902. I opened the door and got out. A fireball crashed right beside me and went back up. The desert lasted for miles. Cactus plants were far ahead. I ran to an oasis in the distance.

I saw a man running away from the oasis. He was tall and wore lion fur. I found a beach and walked along it. The statue of liberty was on the shore. It was cracked and half-buried underground. Tall weeds and boulders were surrounding it. In the distance I saw the Empire State Building. It was on the other side of the lake I was walking by. Near it were the Twin Towers. One of them was broken on the top. The rest of the buildings were either gone or broken.

I went back toward the statue. I passed it and then I walked to the time machine. A person was chained up by some red-haired people. There were some black-haired people holding chained people in a large cage.

I saw the time machine. I took off and went backwards in space. A skeleton was on a spaceship and it was getting its organs and skin back. The tower of Pisa went up. The Washington monument rose up. I came in for a landing. Cars were driving backwards. I touched the ground and got out. I think that I would like to be in New York in 3902.

The 20th Century Dinosaur

The following is one of my earliest surviving works of fiction. I started writing stories as soon as I knew how to write (c. late 1976), but little if anything remains of my literary creativity from before my 4th grade year, when I composed this tale.

This story has been transcribed faithfully from the original manuscript of December 25, 1980. I have even preserved the mysterious misspelling "refrigetar". I say mysterious because I was an excellent speller, and it seems to me rather surprising that I would have misspelled the word refrigerator at all, let alone so egregiously. I did sometimes purposely alter the spelling of words so as to invent some similar but new concept, and that may be what I had in mind in this case; but, to be quite honest, I have no memory of any such intention, and it may actually have been simply a terrible misspelling. In any case, I am leaving the text as is so as to faithfully preserve what I wrote that Christmas Day when I was 10.

* * *

The 20th Century Dinosaur

One day, a boy found an egg in his back yard. It was as big as his hand. He decided to take it to the dairy.

He took it there the next day. In a week, it was gone. The boy couldn't find it. He looked at the place where he had put it last.

There he found a baby dinosaur.

He ate leaves, grain, and fruit.

Pretty soon, he was as big as a cereal box. He grew every day.

One time, he got as big as an elephant.

The boy put him in a room of the 2-room shed. He put blankets in the room. Winter came pretty soon.

The dinosaur ate up to a refrigetar of food a day.

His dad told him to take him to a national zoo. He told him he could see him every year; but the dinosaur might live 150 or 200 more years.

So he took him to the zoo nearby.

In 2180, a boy was at the zoo, looking at the dinosaur. His grandfather told him, "my great-grandfather said that when he was real little his grandfather told him this was his dinosaur."

The Girls Who Spoke For Themselves : Part 6 : What Did It Mean?

Eventually the Kennedy twins faded from the public eye and were largely forgotten. There is not much information about what their lives were like after Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Poto and Cabengo was released in 1980. I wonder how they got along in school, both in terms of learning and in terms of friendships? I wonder what their adult lives have been like?

The only clue is from a show about twins that aired on TLC around 2000, which reported that Virginia and Grace were still developmentally disabled. We are told this:

Now approaching 30, the twins continue to experience speech problems and mental delays. Grace, who has achieved a higher level of functioning than her sister, works at a McDonald's cleaning tables and mopping. Virginia works at a job-training center and performs assembly-line work.

One wonders what Grace and Virginia might have been capable of had their parents not mistakenly assumed that their daughters suffered from mental retardation, and if the girls had received proper attention and a healthy degree of social and emotional nurturing during their earliest, most formative years.

Many who write about the Kennedy twins accept the common assessment of their private language as manifesting nothing more than a lack of proper linguistic development. But this evaluation of the twins' speech, though it may be true as far as it goes, only tells part of the story.

The other, and more significant, side of the story is that Grace and Virginia Kennedy largely taught themselves how to speak. The fact that it was not the "official" language is beside the point. Of course they could not have been expected to master the Queen's English given their limited and oblique exposure to it.

Children's acquisition of language is always a wonder to behold. I experience this miracle on a daily basis with my own daughter. But what the Kennedy twins did is perhaps even more amazing. They took the meager scraps of English and German which fell their way and crafted them into a working and, to them, meaningful and comprehensible language. They taught themselves how to communicate, how to give voice and concrete form to the thoughts and ideas and feelings inside them, using those curious patterns of oral noise that we call words. They simply came up with their own set of linguistic tools, largely improvised from the scattered remnants of the official tongue, like children inventing a civilization out of the charred ruins of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

In so doing, Grace and Virginia Kennedy showed themselves to be incredibly resourceful, creative, and inventive, and their accomplishment will always stand as testimony to their high intelligence, asserting itself despite the tragically stunting conditions in which they had to spend their early childhood. Given their circumstances and what they had to work with, comparing their linguistic development to everyone else is not only utterly unfair, but entirely unreasonable, blindly expressing a bias for the validity of only "official" speech, and disregarding the myriad accidental ways that new forms of language can emerge from old ones.

Recently the New York Times reported that the younger generation in a certain remote and isolated village in Australia has developed a new language, adapted from English and the traditional tongue of the villagers. The Kennedy girls, I think, did something very similar, though on a much smaller scale. (It was the Times article, in fact, that made me remember them.) They didn't do it to be clever. They probably had no idea there was anything strange or unusual about it. They were just trying their best to talk, to use words, and to communicate. And if you ask me, they did a mighty remarkable job.

*

Grace and Virginia, wherever you are now, I wish you well, and I hope your lives are happy. I hope that you still talk to each other, in whatever language, and I hope you have others to talk to as well, friends with whom you can share the beauty that is inside you, through the vehicle of words.

What you made was not a mistake. The grown-ups in your life made the mistakes. What you made was a beautiful and amazing invention. It was a way of speaking that no one else had ever made before, and that no one else will ever make again. It was unique and unrepeatable because so are you. It only sounded strange to other ears because it was different, but it was perfectly natural to you. Like the drawings and crafts and stories that children make, it should not be dismissed as unaccomplished, but admired as the rare and wondrous expression of tender and precious minds--minds that, despite being considered hopelessly crippled, had something to say.

I for one will always admire what you did. I will say to your younger selves as I do to my daughter when she figures out, in her cleverness, how to do something new: "Good job!"

*

The enduring miracle of Grace and Virginia Kennedy is that these two lost little girls, without much help from grown-ups, somehow found their own way to give shape to their world through language. They found a way to give shape to themselves, to give themselves identities, and their own names. They found their own way to communicate, to share the thoughts and feelings they had inside, to express themselves. Although left outside of it, they found a way to be in the world, using the marvelous gift of speech.

FOR POTO AND CABENGO

end