The stuff of children’s nightmares
Growing up in Gander was the stuff of which childhood dreams are made.
As I have described in a few of these weekend offerings, my time in Gander, until the age of 12, when our family out-migrated to the U.S., was jam-packed with all the glorious activities you’d associate with a happy-golucky boy: watching senior hockey at Gander Gardens or fumbling after a puck on a make-shift backyard rink in the winter, trouting with my father at Radio Range Brook in the spring, enjoying endless games of kick the can, softball, Red Rover, tiddly and the like, during summer evenings that seemed to last forever.
But there was a single dreadful experience I do recall, not its details, mind you, given the fact that I was only seven or eight years old at the time, but one that still resides somewhere in my subconscious, and can still prompt cold shivers — a scary image of a bogeyman perched to disrupt our then normally pleasant lives.
I’d hear the grownups refer to it as the “polio scare,” and, at least initially, I knew only that whatever it was would delay the opening of school, which meant more days for me to play in the woods and plug nasty outlaws full of bullet holes.
But then I heard tell that an older brother of one of my schoolmates, only slightly older, I believe, had died of polio; that’s when the bogeyman of the “polio scare” entered my world, an actual killer. It was the first time I had ever heard talk of anyone in my tiny circle having died.
The polio epidemic eventually ended, and I’m sure I and the rest of my buddies adjusted well, blessed with the kind of resiliency kids seem to always have. And soon enough, we were all back in the classroom and playing our after-school games, assured by our parents that life was back to normal.
But the fact remains that the polio epidemic of the late 1950s has stayed with me. I have discussed it many times throughout my life, have written about it on occasion; it remains, as I say, the only nightmare from a lovely childhood.
I place such a godawful topic on your reading agenda on this Saturday because I couldn’t help but wonder of late whether the children of today, here in Newfoundland and throughout the world — isolated for months, unable to see grandparents and uncles and aunts, forced to wear masks, picking up just enough information from their television screens to realize this is real scary stuff — will have had their innocence shattered to a point where the coronavirus will find a place in their psyche forever.
Now, look, I’m not trying to play child psychologist here — my major in university was journalism (with a A-plus minor in beer-drinking), not medicine — and, unlike that dangerous presidential ass to the south of us, I always acknowledge that doctors and others in the medical field know much more about their business than I do.
But I hear enough anecdotal evidence from relatives here, on the mainland and in the States to know that there could, in fact, be long-term repercussions for youngsters forced to live in ways that are totally foreign and mighty frightening, despite the yeoman efforts of their parents to try and create a quasi-normal environment.
Those kids require extraordinary attention during these unprecedented times, and afterwards, as well.
With your indulgence I’d like to make quite the quantum leap, but using Gander once again as a jumping-off point, to have a word or two about the aforementioned ass and the absolutely crazy, diabolical fashion (it’s hard to find an original adjective at this point) in which he is “leading” his countrymen and women during this crisis. (As I alluded to earlier, I have loved ones in the States, so
I don’t observe the bizarre behaviour of President Dunce with detachment).
Anyway, growing up in Gander, we would often tell what we called “little moron” jokes (it was a simpler time, made for simple humour): Why did the little moron bring a ladder to Church? He heard it was a High Mass? Why did the little moron bring a ladder to the party? He heard the drinks were on the house. BA DUM TSS!
But our “little moron” had nothing on that moron in the States, a moron who, I swear to God, is getting worse by the day.
I mean to say you could write your own moron jokes about a man — the most powerful human being on Earth — suggesting people might try injecting disinfectants to keep the virus at bay, or take drugs experts have declared to be downright dangerous, even deadly; who mocks reporters wearing masks as being “politically correct,” caters to nutcases on the religious right by forcing governments to reopen churches, and the list goes on and on.
Richard Nixon may have been morally bankrupt, Bill Clinton may have blindly followed his penis into impeachment, but Donald Trump is a first-class moron, and he should frighten the bejeezus out of every normal-thinking soul in the U.S.
Indeed, Canadian and Newfoundland children may need some help to overcome the fallout from this cursed pandemic.
But American youngsters will also have Trump’s legacy to mess with their innocent heads.