THE CHILDREN now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before the company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannise their teachers.
Plato attributed these words to Socrates who died almost four hundred years before the Birth of Christ (B.C.). Interestingly, Socrates could have been describing the birthday party of my son, Zubin, who was two on June 22, Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ or celebration of the Holy Eucharist). The part about gobbling up the dainties at the table, whether at Zubin's party or the Last Supper, is particularly prophetic.
A lot of time has passed since Socrates passed - everything but the hemlock. However, if anything, life has become even more contradictory. In Trinidad, Labour Day is now a public or bank holiday. This Labour Day was characterised by a threat by labour, including teachers, to withhold their labour for a week. The day before Labour Day was Father's Day. One man, significantly from East Dry River, stole two bottles of whisky for his Old Pa. The security guard could have beaten him black and blue but instead handed him over to the law.
The court was not in session on Labour Day although a Commission of Enquiry into the Judiciary was. The magistrate could have given the thief a warning, perhaps making it mandatory for him to wear Bell's around his neck. Instead, Magistrate Gillian David had no choice, having Red the charges, but to fine the thief in an effort to scotch whisky-stealing. The evidence was there in Black and White. How does a parent come to terms with a situation like this?
A woman rang up her insurance company and said she wanted to change the terms of her insurance policy. "I've just had a baby," she informed the clerk.
"Would you repeat that again, please?" asked the clerk, who had difficulty hearing the caller.
The woman rejoined emphatically, "Not if I can help it."
Yet, it was a woman, Dorothea Eastwood, who wrote this poem to her son:
Son, I am powerless to protect you though
My heart for yours beats ever anxiously,
Blind through piteous darkness you must go,
And find with a new vision lights I see.
If it might ease you I would bear again
All the old suffering that I too have known,
All sickness, terror, and the spirit's pain,
But you, alas, must make those three your own.
Yes, though I beat away a thousand fears
And forge your armour without flaw or chink,
And though I batter Heaven with my prayers,
Yet from a self-filled cup of grief you drink.
Oh, son of woman, since I gave you breath
You walk alone through life to face your death.
Many Corpus Christies ago I marched with my friends from school, in a parade, flags flying proudly and with the Holy Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, displayed and celebrated. As I watched, through the louvred windows, Zubin and the other little kids playing, I thought of another father who looked at his son, helpless to help, hoping only that the legacy of love would last. Looking at this so vulnerable little boy and his sister, just one year older, I also wondered about the wisdom of having two infants at my age.
Like Williston Fish in "The Hobo's Will" I can leave them the best of this world. He said, "And I leave to children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the Night and the Moon and the train of the Milky Way to wonder at...and I give to each child the right to choose a star that shall be his, and I direct that the child's father shall tell him the name of it, in order that the child shall always remember the name of that star after he has learned and forgotten astronomy."
And I told myself (following Samuel Ullman), "You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of your heart, there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth from men and from the Infinite - so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!"
Tony Deyal was last seen talking about a father who was reading Bible stories to his young son. He read, "The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city, but his wife looked back and was turned to salt." His son asked, "What happened to the flea?"
