Old Mother Goose con Chile Verde
Prologue, Part I
Forty six years ago, when I was still a youth in my velvet prime, filled with wanderlust, much of my then ample time was spent in visiting the farthest corners of the world that had so intrigued me.
I had returned to Taos, New Mexico, with only seven years of teaching experience under my belt, fully intent on doing my laundry, packing my clothes, and going off to Mongolia, Russia and China. My teaching career in various foreign languages had just begun at Mayfield High School in Las Cruces, but I felt that I was missing out on something more. I was starting to ponder exploring the world further when the unexpected happened: The local school superintendent offered me a post, teaching seventh grade English at Taos Junior High. I had never given much thought to returning home to teach, and I had very little exposure to the junior-high age group. I was sure that I would hate it, and then I would move on.
Little did I know that the Taos mystique would grab a hold of me, even as it had grabbed so many others in ages past, and by the time my first semester was over, I had fallen in love with the Taos kids. The following year I was asked to move up to the eighth grade and the same kids went with me. The ninth grade followed suit. After the third year, the kids were very much part of my extended family, and they didn’t think I was that weird dude that said and asked for strange things of them anymore.
Long story short, on my fourth year, Mrs. Jeanne Payton, who used to teach French at the high school, passed away, and so Principal Alfred Córdova asked me to move forward again and head the Department of Foreign Languages. With me, you guessed it, came my students, who encouraged me to add Spanish, Russian and Latin to the curriculum. They stayed with me for another three years. By the time they were graduated, they had been in my classes for six years and often for multiple times in the course of one day. One kid who had taken twelve classes from me, boasted that he had a degree in “Larry Torres studies!”
As the students sought more and more information, a former student raised the question: “Was there ever a real Mother Goose?” Mercifully I had had excellent French teachers, who had given me the
answer: “Yes, there was a real Mother Goose. She was a French queen in the Dark Ages named ‘Bertha’ (719-783), who was married to King Pepin the Short (715-766). Despite Queen Bertha’s physical deformity, she bore King Pepin three children named Charlemagne, Carloman and Gisela.”
So the next question was: “What was Queen Bertha’s physical disability?” The answer: “She had a wide, clubbed foot which was commonly called a ‘goose foot,’ hence the name Mother Goose. Popular lore attributes to her, the talent for composing some to the first nursery rhymes, in order to entertain her baby boy Charlemagne, as she clumped about the castle of Laon. Charlemagne would later grow up to be the Holy Roman Emperor and defender of Pope Leo III on behalf of the Franks. Across time, her “mother” status also equated her with “Old Mother Hubbard” and “the Old woman who lived in a shoe.”
The students loved the anecdote, and they would jokingly call me “Father Goose,” not knowing that in reality there was already a film by that name, starring Cary Grant. However they did inspire me to translate the nursery rhymes into a Spanish that rhymed every bit as much as the English ones. In the nursery rhyme: “Old Mother Goose when she wanted to wander, would fly through the air on a very fine gander.” Thus began my quest to live out my childhood in various languages.