Make It Stop
All night long, in between sporadic bouts of sleep, an unshakeable tune has been running through my head. It’s The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, a song I remembered from my own childhood and decided to introduce to Felix. Its infectious melody was composed in 1907 by John Walter Bratton, and its haunting lyrics were added in 1932 by an Irish songwriter named Jimmy Kennedy. It was recorded by many well-known singers over the years, including Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, whose versions I probably heard in the 1950s. The recording I’ve been listening to lately was made by Anne Murray in the 1970s and it is posted as a video on you-tube. My grandson likes it so much, he has taken to saying Nonna and bear, and pointing to the computer screen to settle in on my lap and watch bizarre images of bears dancing and feasting in some faraway forest, until the stern face of a clock declares it is bedtime and they must all return to snuggle in their beds because they are tired little teddy bears. There’s something ominous and macabre about the tune and the tale. It even begins with a warning: “If you go out in the woods tonight, you better go in disguise…” and the whole business feels furtive and mysterious and ill-fated. But I dare you to listen and escape unscathed. I’ll post the link in a moment, out of sheer perversity.
As with so many of my vexing issues, this one is my own fault. “It’s an ear worm,” Monte warned, after hearing the first few notes, but I didn’t pause it. Anything that charms Felix or holds his interest is part of my repertoire in this new career of mine as Nonna. If he points to my backpack and says cookie, a cookie will emerge. If he taps my lap and says bear, I know what I must do. I am aspiring to be beloved and fun, and I don’t have a lot of time to forge my reputation.
I don’t know what he is learning from this ritual or the song itself, but it can’t be especially good. Something about sneaky disobedience, about partying to excess until the old farts put an end to it, something about mysterious unfathomable goings-on in the woods and anthropomorphic bears emasculated of their wildness and cheaply assuaged by sugar and a dance. He is also learning that the screen is a portal to the universe and an easy balm, and I suppose that contributes to laziness and passivity, but he has after all, entered a world in which screens and devices are ubiquitous. Very little happens without a cell phone in his face, and Nonna herself was, until very recently, nothing more than a flat image on a screen, suddenly here in three dimensions, and what does that tell him about reality? He’s a pandemic baby, too. People wear masks as often as not, and that’s just the way it is. Socializing happens in backyards and playgrounds, and there isn’t a lot of hugging going on, and every now and then the grown-ups stick a swab up their noses and wait for a red line to appear, and none of this is weird because it’s all the kid has known.
I want so much for him to have a better world, and at the moment, things are not exactly lining up nicely, and Nonna is worried. On the other hand, my 1950s childhood might well have been another planet, as remote as it is from the realities of today, and this leads me to believe that unlikely and unimaginable things are yet to manifest for Felix and his peers, and some of them will be wonderful and good. But when all the teddy bears have gone to bed, Nonna is still awake, and the universe thrums with the sound of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, somehow both sinister and defiant, scary and festive, and totally absurd…which may be more appropriate than I care to admit–and I can’t make this music stop.
Go ahead. Click this link. I dare you: