Precocious Jennifer

St Patrick's Day is coming up and sadly it's become just another excuse to get drunk. I was working one Bobby Burns Day and that's been turned into a bit of a party night, too. The bright looking attractive young couple I picked up at the student cluster housing was not going to waste the opportunity and told me they wanted to go to The Irish Times, a downtown pub well liked by the upwardly mobile in our town. Scotch, Irish, whatever.
"So you're celebrating Bobby Burns Day," I said, and made a few jokes about haggis and single malt. Then I opined that Scotland deserved praise for having their national day named after a poet.
"Oh," said the sweet young thing. "Was Bobby Burns a poet?"
I was a little stunned that, having graduated with sufficiently high marks from a Canadian high school to be enrolled in a Canadian University, she had never heard of the poetry of Robert Burns. So I recited a few lines of one famous poem that goes:
Wee sliket, cowerin, timorous beastie
Oh what a panic's in thy breestie...
I had memorized most of it for the occassion, and she was rather intrigued with the part about man's dominion breaking Nature's social union, seeing it as 'ahead of its time.' But they soon tired of the conversation and asked me if I had any tunes.
A few nights later I drove three generations of ladies into town from the airport, grandmother, about my age, daughter about 35 and granddaughter. Jennifer was one of those preternaturally bright children with the vocabulary of a well educated adult, enunciation as clear as if she had a diction coach, and well able to converse with her elders. Wanting badly to get in on the conversation with such a little elf I was very happy when she asked me if I was a cab driver.
"No." I said.
Her elders tittered a little at the pleasantry but Jennifer thought very seriously for a few minutes. I could almost hear the gears and sprockets turning and meshing inside her pretty little skull. "Yes you are," she said accusingly. She had got it. It was a little variation on the liar's paradox and there was no way she was going to let it get by her without resolving it. So I said "Yes, I am a cab driver. I was lying when I said I wasn't a cab driver."
This, of course made things even worse from a logical point of view.
You have to be careful with children because they take things too seriously. They don't really understand jokes, especially sarcasm. For example I was taken once to a baseball game as a boy in my home town. We had a baseball team called the Edmonton Eskimos. Innocently, I asked who they were playing against. "The Brooklyn Dodgers," I was told. I knew who the Brookly Dodgers were. They were in the world series on the radio. I knew the names of the players, had seen their faces on bubble gum cards. So when the Eskimos beat them I thought we must have one of the best teams in the world. It was years before I realized that it was a joke.
Anyway, I changed the subject, and remembering that she had just turned six offered to recite her a poem by A.A. Milne. It goes:
When I was One
I had just begun
When I was Two
I was nearly new
When I was Three
I was hardly me
When I was Four
I was not much more
When I was Five
I was just alive
But now I'm six
And I'm clever as clever
And I think I will be six
Forever and ever.

She asked me to repeat it a few times until she had almost memorized it but by that time we were at the hotel. Just before she got out I turned around to look at her and found her eyes boring into mine. I couldn't help thinking of those stories in Irish folklore where the fairies exchange one of their children for one of ours.
But the main thing I thought about was something I have thought about many times before. How is it that a young child who is naturally curious with the enchanting world he has been born into comes out on the other end of twelve years of school knowing nothing, interested in nothing, culturally impoverished? Energetic and bright at five, dull and listless at fifteen.
Maybe puberty is to blame, maybe it's a difficult test no matter what. The need to be cool, to be stylish, to meet the approval of the right crowd, to suddenly be ruled by your crotch. Or maybe something is wrong with sending children to a school away from home where they are taught by teachers who do not have any intrinsic love for the material they are teaching. But maybe poetry, word games, puzzles that tickle the mind, when intoduced to a young child can help as sort of prophylactic against raging hormones and indifferent teaching.
What made me think of all this was a nice little volume of nonsense verse I found in Chapters, our downtown big box bookstore. Put out by Everyman's Library, it is nicely bound, printed on good quality paper, and has a well-chosen selection of witty and clever verse of a kind that children would enjoy having read to them. Unfortunately, Chapters takes a dim view of people like me taking notes from the books they want to sell. "This is a bookstore, not a library." I was told by the security person. Fair enough, I have nothing against a store making a profit. So here are a few things from my own bookshelves that I think children might like.

It's hard to believe that the composer of the Wasteland could pen lines like these:

I have a Gumbie cat in mind her name is Jennyanydots
Her coat is of the tabby kind with tiger stripes and leopard spots

but further on the opening cuteness transforms itself:
She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice
Their behavior's not good and their manners not nice

Yes, Jennyanydots may be cute and cuddly, but she is also a merciless killer. T.S. Eliot didn't pander to the modern urge to make everything nice. Never forget that children are savages, too.

Edward Lear, born in 1812, wrote a lot of nonsense verse for children. In his alphabet book,
Z was once a piece of zinc
Tinky
Winky
Blinky
Tinky
Tinkly winkly
Piece of zinc.

Ogden Nash, born in 1902:
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
Were it not for making a living which is rather a nouciance

There's lots of it. Infectious humour, love of language, quirky ways of looking at things. Maybe a few doses of good, light poetry would painlessly inoculate a child against the inevitable banalities of looming adulthood.
It was during adolescence that I discovered poetry, specifically e.e. cummings. Nice of him to do away with capitals, punctuation and such frivolities, I thought. And the subject matter was nice and racy and they provided lines for me to use in attempted seductions. A pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues, he wrote. I liked that line very much. Nowadays I find his cheap cynicism and his Marxist politics tiresome. But as life goes on our outlook changes and ripens. How mysterious is the great power lurking in words that some of our fellow humans are able to discover.