Just Around the Corner

Just around the corner 

there is always something 

that wasn’t there yesterday. 

Maybe just a black shiny pebble 

tossed from a child’s hand, 

  maybe a new fence erected 

    maybe tiny weeds growing,

flowering amid drying grasses. 

Noticing these tiny changes 

in a world gone mad 

shows me that 

   the black shiny pebble, 

      the new fence, 

        the tiny flowering weeds 

know nothing of the state of our planet. 

They have no ears to hear the chaos, 

   nor eyes to watch out for a new face in the news. 

But they are always just around the corner.

“There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. 

It is the idea of something around the corner,”

Gilbert K. Chesterton, writer

(1874 ~ 1936)

Through the Years

Coming into a world 

so down trodden and 

beaten, each child born

knows only of 

hunger and a yearning 

to be cared for. 

With the blossom of youth, 

accepting life as it has become, 

the yearning is still to be loved. 

In the journey of 

   moments, 

     years and 

        decades 

there is more doing than being 

while beneath it all 

remains the desire to be loved. 

“We are all born for love. It is the principle 

of existence and it’s only end.”

~ Benjamin Israeli, British Prime Minister & writer

Re-post: Book Review: The Hidden Child by Louise Fein

Mabel is only five years old. A lovely, happy, chatty child with soft curls whose mother and father love her dearly. It’s the late 1920’s. World War I has passed and World War II is not yet upon England. Mabel’s father, Edward Hamilton, a decorated war hero has been decommissioned with an honourable discharge. When he meets Eleanor, a secretary in the War Office, Edward was there to receive his discharge papers. He leaves her a note as he was leaving inviting her to tea ~ ‘strictly professional’. An idyllic life is to follow. Edward, already involved in England’s Eugenics Society, enlists Eleanor in his research. She comes to believe in it’s precepts ~ “The aim of the eugenics moment is to improve the human population by increasing reproduction of the most desirable characteristics in human beings and suppressing reproduction of the least desirable - for example, inheritable disease, mental retardation, and so forth. - Edward Hamilton.” 

One of those so-called inheritable diseases was epilepsy. Louise Fein has written epilepsy as one more character in this story, making an appearance only nine times. Suddenly and for few pages. In each appearance, it tells us that only his control matters. He describes seizures both inside and outside the brain. This character tells us: “……,whatever harm I do, you do far worse.”

The novel opens with Eleanor driving their trap pulled by their pony Dilly to meet her sister Rose at the train. As they come to a stop, Mabel has her first seizure. In an attempt to deny the seriousness of that day, and the reality of her condition, it goes undiagnosed for some time. However, it grows increasingly worse. The story takes a frightening turn. To avoid exposure for Edward’s ‘good name’ in the eugenics movement, and all the research he has done, they turn to a neurologist who recommends hospitalization and ultimately institutionalization. Not uncommon at that time, there were no apparent alternatives, at least in England. Rose, Eleanor’s sister, brings news of an alternative treatment developed at the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. Edward and the neurologist treating Mabel both refuse to even read the information Eleanor has located and researched.

For Mabel, this darling five year old child, she couldn’t know that she would be trapped in the dreadful scheme of care where she was hidden. Or that both her parents had other secrets that bound them. Secrets that are revealed to change their beliefs about eugenics. She also wouldn't know that in the end she would get the care needed from a very unlikely quarter. What she did know was that her parents loved her very much.

Louise Fein has written this novel because of her own trials with her young daughter. She has carefully researched the eugenics movement and the important and historical figures who were pivotal in its formation. Other of her characters in the story both supported and sometimes excused certain behaviours. All were bound by society mores of the time. 

Epilepsy has been my own unwanted guest for many, many years. As I read this important story of Mabel and her parents Eleanor and Edward Hamilton, I was in turn infuriated and finally very grateful that I, and many others, have not suffered the same indignities.

“Oh yes, you humans think yourselves above the animals, 

with your clever brains and fancy morals; 

but really, it’s your inhumanity that sets you apart”

~ Louise Fein, The Hidden Child

Title: The Hidden Child

Author: Louise Fein

Copyright: 2021

Publisher: P.S.™- a trademark of Harper Collins Publishers

Type: Novel

Format: Hardcover

ISBN: 978-0-06-311924-6 (hardcover library edition)

ISBN: 978-0-06-309093-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-06-320543-7 (international edition)

Becoming a Christmas Tree (2012) - Revised

“Hey Joe!  What about this one?  Should we leave it? Doesn’t look like much more than firewood to me.”   

“Nope, we’re supposed to take everything. They can figure out what to do with it. We just cut’em and haul'em.”  

*****

A deafening buzz in the snowy quietness, ended my life in the forest. I was the last tree cut and tossed on top of the load of my neighbours on a smelly grumbling thing. Cold air rushed through my sparse branches when we started to move. It didn’t make sense. I was lying down!

And now look at me. If you can. Down here, now at the bottom of a pile of lush, soft green trees.  All shapes and sizes of humans come in here pawing through us all. When their hands find me, always by accident, they think I am part of some other much handsomer tree.  At first they’d pull at me and then let go in disgust when they saw how bent my branches were.

*****

“Firewood – that’s all it’s good for.” 

“That’s a charley brown Christmas tree if I ever saw one.”  

“Someone will buy him – someone with no sense and too many decorations."  

“Our room is far too grand for that ugly old stump.  I don’t even know why they’ve kept it in this lot.” 

****

Finally.  I’m alone in the Christmas tree lot, lights still blinking over the sign that announced in big bold letters: ‘Fresh cut Christmas trees!’ Fresh! Hmph!  I’ve been lying here in this muck moon to moon. All the others have gone and here I am – cold and lonely, with my bare bottom exposed for all to see.  Soggy branches on one side and drying up on top!  My branches feel stiffer and colder with each incredibly slow day. Being fire wood is beginning to sound good. Oh, I do wish that child would stop crying. He’s dripping salt water all over me. He’s holding my top branch so tight he’s going to take all my few remaining needles off!  

Then I heard a soft voice reminding me of the breezes in the forest in springtime: “OK sweetie, he’s really not much! I don’t know what your dad’s going to think. You know what he said. He wanted a tall, bushy tree and this one is short and stumpy.” 

Then I was being picked up out of the muck. It felt so good to at last to have the dirty half melted snow shaken onto the ground.  I could hear my branches sigh with relief as the young mother tucked me in the back of the little family’s beat up old car. My branches began to relax, and my crooked trunk lay on a soft blanket in the warmth of the old car.  The little one was no longer crying, thank goodness.  One chubby little hand stretched from the front seat to hold onto an unruly twig at my very top. In old car’s warmth, I felt like a real decorated Christmas tree. 

“I never thought it was such a bad little tree. 

It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.”

~ A Charle Brown Christmas

**Author’s note: This is one of the first stories that I posted on my blog (December 2012). I have revised it considerably. It was an early attempt at telling a story from the perspective of a tree - with pretty good grammar and vocabulary! 

Only My Inner Child

All I saw was glorious clouds

reflected in shades of peach  

from the setting sun 

shredded banks, 

long strips 

or little puffs

I had to stop, lift my eyes and 

breathe deeply of the soft evening.

Where was even one other child 

to share in that magnificent sight?

“We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. 

We fail to teach them how to revere, how to ease wonder and awe.”

~ Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author, lecturer

Child's Play

Never more grateful than 

when I know that 

balance is flexible. 

I watch children running up and down a teeter totter, 

laughing and revelling 

in the joy of their balance. 

Never standing still 

in the centre of the game. 

We can try 

to stay rigidly balanced, 

but when life tips up or down, 

we may be headed for a big fall

unless we take our balance with us.

“Balance is not something you find, 

it’s something you create.”

~ Jana Kingsford, entepreneur

The Wisdom of Children

 

Ideals render us strong ~ 

shining and firm in resolve 

until that resolve becomes 

stiff and unyielding ~ 

until a little child asks us 

why 

and we have no answer.

“When the wings of idealism break, may you land safely on your feet.”

~ Terry Guillemets, Age Fall, 2009