Anonymous Song artist, Duckling  (Famous Album Leaves of the Sung Dynasty)

ALAN writes:

The water is high on rivers in and around St. Louis. One day this week I walked along a path by a waterway and came upon a duck near water’s edge with eight ducklings meandering around her. I paused to watch them and stood motionless. They saw me but swam closer and then proceeded to explore the grass just a few yards from where I stood. They gave a fine show at no cost.

Several days earlier I sat on a bench in a green area with a lake and a fountain in suburban St. Louis. It was once called Audubon Park. Ducks and geese are always in evidence there. Three pairs of geese were swimming about on the lake. No doubt they were eyeing me, a solitary figure seated on that bench.

Within a few minutes they came closer and then walked up to the grass at lake’s edge. They made themselves comfortable not more than three yards from where I sat. For half an hour, they cleaned and preened themselves, sometimes balancing exquisitely on one leg.  Occasionally they talked with their companions across the lake.

They did not talk to me, nor I to them.  The only communication was telepathic. They knew I was no menace to them. We paid each other the supreme expression of respect:  We left each other alone. Then they sat down to relax. Some of them took a nap or semi-nap, resting their heads on their bodies but angled in such a way that they could keep one eye on the mysterious creature wearing a fedora and watching them quietly from his perch on that bench. Again: They put on a fine show at no cost. I have more respect for such birds than for 95 percent of the human race.

These are the kinds of things that most grown-ups ignore or dismiss as insignificant because they cannot abide activities that are not fast, loud, and flashy. Watching birds is definitely not fast, loud, or flashy. Children know better. Children find such things fascinating, and they are right.

Which leads me to the third ray of light:

Regarding the size of little children, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

           “The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels…..  When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature…..”

[The Defendant, Dodd, Mead, 1902, p. 116]

I felt something similar to that on the Wednesday before Easter.  It was an ideal spring day in St. Louis, filled with warmth and blue skies.  In late afternoon, I was walking along a block of homes in a residential neighborhood.

Farther along the block in front of me I could see a woman getting out of her car.

As I approached that point, I saw that she was accompanied by two little children.  Obviously they were just arriving home from somewhere.  She was a young white woman and her children were no older than two.  I could hear fragments of their conversation, but neither she nor they were loud.

As I walked past them, they were standing at the curb and preparing to cross the sidewalk to go into their home.  I stepped up my pace a little in order not to get in their way as I walked past that house.

The children were talking with their mother.  One was a girl and I could not stop to see whether the younger one was a boy or girl.  As I walked past, the two children occupied a part of my field of vision and suddenly I became acutely aware of how big and tall and scary I must have seemed to them.

I am as hard-boiled as they come. I eat rusty nails for breakfast. I do not suffer fools gladly. I do not wish a nice day to people who are forever telling me to have a nice day.  I have always resented Mark Twain for coining the expression “The damned human race”, thereby depriving me of that pleasure.  I look upon most modern books as junk, but I concede that many are not that good.  I am in favor of capital punishment and implacably opposed to any kind of leniency.  I think busybodies ought to wear flashing neon signs reading BEWARE! I AM A DO-GOODER.

But those two children interrupted all of that, for a moment.  How they looked and the muted sound of their voices as they spoke with their mother impressed itself upon me most forcefully at that instant.  It was a startling contrast to the indescribable ugliness, depravity, and loudness that are now so typical in this decadent city.  It was so utterly different from those things and so unexpected that it brought tears to my eyes as I continued walking along that street.

I had glimpsed something decent;  something unpretentious;  something not ironic;  something as far removed from hip, cool, and ironic as one edge of the galaxy from the other.

What I had just seen and heard was a vivid reminder of what once was.  The thought occurred to me:  They are so tiny; so utterly dependent on their elders; so uncorrupted; and so filled with the joy and astonishment of being alive that only small, uncorrupted children can feel.

These words cannot convey the intensity of what I felt at that moment.

Ten years ago Laura Wood asked:

        “Have you noticed there are fewer children?  Does it seem to affect almost everything we are?”  

                [“Children No More”, The Thinking Housewife, May 7, 2009 ]

Indeed I have noticed.  It is extremely rare to see any white children at all in a city as decadent as St. Louis has become in recent years.  Children are one of life’s greatest treasures.  And yet as I walk here and there in St. Louis, entire months go by during which I never see any such children. There should be dozens of white families with many such children in every neighborhood in St. Louis.  There were – once.

That is what stupid white Americans have lost or forfeited or abandoned in favor of the depravity and excess of a dying culture.

And I saw my mother, too, in that scene before me:  In those two tiny children — because I knew that she would have understood exactly why and how I could feel what I did when seeing and hearing them — because she too, like those children, remained uncorrupted throughout her life by the evil and ugliness around her — because she, too, conveyed the feeling of joy and astonishment and happiness at being alive to me when I was that tiny and that dependent — because she took just as much delight in my childhood as I did — because in those years I gave her the chance to share that feeling, and by doing so she doubled it for herself and for me.

Please follow and like us: