Perspective

In the 1993 movie, Indian Summer, a group of childhood friends, now adults, revisit their old summer camp. One of the characters, played by Kevin Pollack, can’t get over how “tiny” everything looks to his now adult eyes. In one scene, he keeps repeating “Everything’s so tiny. Tiny, tiny, tiny!” The other characters ignore him until it’s clear he’s not going to quit talking about it. Someone finally says to him, “Look, everything’s the same size. YOU’RE bigger.” It’s true, our perspective changes. Knowing this, I often pause before deciding to revisit things from my childhood. I want my cherished childhood memories to stay cherished. So, when my eight year old daughter Megan and I were recently at the library perusing the audio books, I felt surprise, delight, and then apprehension when I saw Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle on the shelf. I loved the Piggle-Wiggle books as a kid! Four Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books were written by Betty MacDonald before she died in 1958. When I realized as a child that the author was already dead (and not just dead, but really dead – I mean, good grief, my parents were children in the 1950s and she had lived her whole life and died? It was incomprehensible), I was sad, to say the least. So I read the four Piggle-Wiggles many times. To those of you unfamiliar with Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the heroine is a widowed, older woman who loves children, lives in an upside down house (except for the bathroom and kitchen, of course) and has countless “cures” for childhood ailments, such as taking tiny bites of food, being a bully, whispering all the time, that kind of thing. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s cures are based on the theory that immersing a child in the unwanted behavior s/he indulges in will rid the child of the behavior. For example, one of my favorite tales was about a girl who refused to bathe. At Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s instruction, the girl’s parents allow the girl to no longer bathe. When a layer of dirt covers the girl’s body, her parents tucked tiny radish seeds into the dirt. Once the seeds sprouted, the girl was mortified. She voluntarily scrubbed herself clean that day and every day after. On the day that Megan and I stood in the children’s audio books section at the library, I was torn – sort of, well ok, I couldn’t wait to read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle again and I prayed with all my might that I still like the stories. As we began to listen to the book, I noticed things I had never noticed as a child. Every child in the book comes from a two-parent home consisting of the child’s biological mother and biological father. Every father has a day job to which he goes every week day and returns home in the evening. Every mother stays home and works as a housewife (or Home Economics Engineer, as we might say today). Every family is, as far as I can tell, Caucasian. Every family has two to four children. I’m tempted to scoff at this, but I began to wonder, did the author really intentionally discriminate, or was that just her worldview? After all, she never lived to hear the “I Have a Dream” speech, the skyrocketing of the divorce rate, or the airing of problems like abuse. I couldn’t resist finding out more about MacDonald, so I did a little searching. As it turns out, Betty MacDonald herself divorced her first husband (and it seems Husband #1 did not live the traditional life, his life ended in 1951 when he was stabbed, yes stabbed, to death). Following her divorce, MacDonald spent nearly a decade struggling as a single mother. During that decade, she spent almost a year at a sanitarium receiving treatment for tuberculosis. While MacDonald did re-marry and settle into a more comfortable lifestyle, she was not done squaring off with hardship. She died at the age of 49 of cancer. So, this knowledge of course changes my view of Betty MacDonald. Maybe the Piggle-Wiggle books were served as a sort of escapist fantasy. Maybe the idea of being able to fix a problem in a chapter appealed to MacDonald. I guess only MacDonald knows and I won’t get the opportunity to chat with her anytime soon (provided I live a good, long life). Maybe someone should say to me, “The stories are the same, YOU’RE different.” One last thing, as I was working on this entry, I had the good fortune of being directed to another blog entry by childrens author Laurel Snyder. In Snyder’s entry, Snyder imagines the the last unwritten chapter of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. It’s hysterical, and I insist you check it out:
http://laurelsnyder.com/2010/01/02/the-last-days-of-mrs-piggle-wiggle/
And special thanks to Kurtis Scaletta (who directed me to Laurel Snyder’s blog) for knowing every one and every thing and his willingness to share.