by Bruce Thompson.
There, there; everything will be all right.
Or else it won’t. There are two kinds of lullabies. One kind promises a safe, beautiful world in which children are cherished and loved.
Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry.
Go to sleepy little baby.
When you wake you shall have
all the pretty little horses.
The other kind tells the bitter truth.
Rock-a-bye, baby, in the tree top
When the wind blows the cradle will rock;
when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
and down will come baby, cradle and all.
The fact is that parents don’t know what to tell their children. And I don’t know what to tell you either. Will human decency prevail, and children be reunited with their refugee parents? Or will the bough break?
This country has been through trying times before. In the 1970s my parents didn’t know what to tell me about Richard Nixon. They half-believed that Nixon would be the last president—that his outrageous argument that, “if the president does it, it isn’t illegal,” would be upheld in law, and that democracy as we know it would come to an end. I was too young to know what to think. My parents, however, had been through troubled times before, so they held on to a kind of irrational faith.
The year was 1952—the year of my birth—but the year was long in the tooth, and Christmas was coming. My father was a journalist working for a small local newspaper in Mauston, Wisconsin, having just completed his journalism degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. When I say the newspaper was small, I mean that my father was their only reporter. The publisher and his wife lived in an apartment above the printing shop; we lived in the smaller apartment down the hall. My mother helped with the folding and mailing of the newspaper on Thursday evenings as the paper came off the press. She would put me in a bassinette next to the press as she did her work. To this day I fall instantly asleep when I hear the soothing to-pock-it-ta to-pock-it-ta of an offset press.
My father was a talented writer, and one of the perks of his job was that he was occasionally allowed to write the editorial for the opinion page. That week he had written what was (in its time) a shocking exposé of the pagan origins of Christmas—that the Christmas tree, or Yule log, was a pagan symbol, and that mistletoe, holly, and ivy are likewise pagan in origin. Nowadays, I assume no one will find such banalities worth a second glance; but, in 1952 it was heresy! The newspaper was flooded with hate mail. Among the more rational comments (to quote my mother) were “send that pinko communist Thompson back to Russia, or wherever the hell he comes from!” (In those days, of course, Russia was the enemy.) I should, perhaps, mention that the Senator from Wisconsin was Joe McCarthy, and that the Senate hearings on un-American activities were in full swing. It was a tense time in Wisconsin; and my father had stepped into the very middle of it.
The next morning my mother stepped outside the apartment to get milk from the milk box. (In those days milk was delivered to the front door, once or twice a week.) Behind the milk box was a manila envelope. In the envelope was a knife! It was—as I remember the story—a paring knife, not threatening in itself, but sharp enough to be dangerous in the wrong hands. My mother was shaken to her core.
You would have to know my mother to grasp the significance of that last sentence. My mother was perhaps the most sensible, unflappable human being ever to have existed. For her to be shaken says something profound about the political climate of the times. Democracy itself must have been teetering on the brink! Joe McCarthy and his minions were an existential threat.
My mother didn’t panic. But she also didn’t want to be alone. She snatched me up in her arms, carried me to the door of my father’s boss, and knocked. His wife answered the door.
“Carolyn!? Is everything all right? Won’t you come in for a cup of tea?”
My mother carried me in, and spent some time gossiping. After a while she confessed the reason for her visit.
“I found a knife behind the milk box. I’m so worried!”
“Oh, that!” the boss’s wife replied. “I got one, too. The milk company always likes to give us a Christmas gift this time of year.”
So, everything will be all right, won’t it? After all, in my lifetime, we are 0 for 2. Democracy will survive. But make no mistake. In this world there are ghosties and ghoulies, and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night. And nothing makes a more profound bump in the night than a cradle falling from a tree.