Itty Bitty Tiny Tall Tales

The bombardment was blowing the trenches and the buildings in the neighborhood to bits. My brother and I sweated bullets. Our parents prayed. From the all-alert to the all-clear siren we lay prostrate under the bed, lying on our bellies. It was a time when food was scarce, fear and leisure alone were in abundance. The Brits had bolted from Malaysia with their tails between their legs. They promised to come back and they sure did. Although we remained caught during the intervening four years in the Vise Grip of anguish and anxiety, which seemed never ending, we pressed on inexorably. We kept the faith.

For our parents it must have been the “worst of times” for at their age, their stage in life, they think years ahead and dread the unknown and the unpredictable; but my brother and I were young and “to be young was very heaven.” Let our parents worry about our future.

Reflecting on these days a feeling of sadness grips me. Nothing unites a family more than common danger, a family drawn close by more than consanguinity or mere proximity, a union forged by hardship and fear palpable and present. The vegetables we grew in our backyard were our “daily bread.” We will do well to listen to the happy child we once were. Caught up in the mundane world of deadlines and dead- ends, we often stifle its cries but cannot silence it’s ever-present voice. Pray, has it not been said, “Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? And the poet William Wordsworth believes “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” We grow old and gray and feeble, but the child we once were providentially continues to dwell within us as the happy inner child. How else can one explain the urge to write in this fashion.