“Jack Sprat could eat
no fat, his wife could eat no lean
And so betwixt them
both, you see, they licked the platter clean.”
These random little
rhymes were taught us from infancy. Sometimes we learned them from parents
singing to us, sometimes we learned them from teachers at school, and sometimes
we never really learned them until we got older and read a few books. There are
zillions (or seemingly so) of them but we, here in America, got most of our
nursery rhymes from a very clever, real person living in colonial Massachusetts
(which explains references to pound, pence and London Towne in distinctly
American rhymes) having been born in England. In reality she is a conglomerate
of mothers of the Goose name in Boston and she is sometimes credited with being
a woman named Mary Goose. I don’t know much about her, but I’m a cemetery
fanatic but once upon a time I encountered her grave in the cemetery next to
the Boston Commons.
Sometimes
I find an odd comfort in those old nursery rhymes, “Wee Willie Winkle runs
through the town in his nightgown…” They come from a place of safety in our
minds from long ago and, more importantly, they are the reassurance of our
ancestors from ages back letting us know we would be okay. Who knew that there
were fad diets even in the 1600’s? Mother Goose as she aptly wrote of it in
Jack Sprat (if indeed that is one of her rhymes…) And here we are renaming old
diets with things like the Paleo Diet or the Atkins Diet or whatever. It’s either
a no fat or no lean diet, isn’t it?
I
would venture to guess that more English-speaking people quote Mother Goose
than the Bible or William Shakespeare. Maybe I’m giving her too much credit. So
what if she was just a collector of folk verse? I am pretty sure she made up a
few of her own and those were collected, then redone for new children and
originally penned by dear old Mother Goose? She’s as much a fairy tale as her
rhymes.
Even
here as I write in the summer sun and notice a spider, I can’t help but think
of Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet breakfasting on curds and whey (I’m not a
fan of whey, but curds are wonderful). “Along came a spider and sat down beside
her and frightened Miss Muffett away.” Like Miss Muffet, I’m not a fan of
spiders but I’m a more modern American, so when I see a spider I just smash it.
I
find it easy to slide back into childhood with one of those little rhymes, and
also an imaginary earlier time of innocence where little pigs go to market and
stay home and eat roast beef (!) and cry whee whee all the way home. All periods
of life have had difficulties, yet when the plague raged we inherited “Ring
Around the Rosie,” so now while we’re being plagued by a new virus I find myself
returning to the age old comfort of Mother Goose rhymes and the snippets of
another age that was also tough, yet mothers and fathers still loved and
comforted their children, and now we, their grandchildren still love and
comfort our children with the same rhymes. Funny how comforting our children
comforts us. Funny how we think so many things are new, yet really they are
simply reiterations of the past. Funny how that is comforting.
“Little
Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his Christmas Pie. He put in his thumb and
pulled out a plum and said, ‘My, what a good boy am I.’” While most of us don’t
have plums in our Christmas pies, its fun to think of it, isn’t it?
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