My Nana was a strong woman surviving a childhood that would send most people spiraling into a dark place, yet my first memories of her are sitting on her sun-porch with her laughing. She was “Mrs. Cucumber” and I was “Mr. Tomato” and we were up to some nonsense. Whenever times got tough, she would smile and remind me that she had been through the Great Depression. She would gently point out that times had been very bad, nobody wanted them back, but they had made goodness in them.
She had grown up in the country, not the sanitized rural life of the Little House on the Prairie television show, and so she never had much stomach for the back to nature movement. I always felt that she escaped a lack of electricity and indoor plumbing for me and I had no right to set the family back.
When I was a boy, she had no pets, the one defect (from my child’s point of view) I can recall. As a result of our complaints, she purchased a series of plastic parrots which sat on a perch in the kitchen. They had most excellent names: The Doctor, the Captain, the Professor. She pointed out that they provided many of the benefits of an actual bird, color and an object to listen to talk, but none of the liabilities.
And for some reason, I believed her. I granted her the plastic parrot and assumed it was sort-of-real.* Plastic parrots were not, I think, something I naturally liked, but by the time she was done I loved them.
So it went every time I visited her. There was not much stuff, but there was a great deal of happiness and happiness never has to make do. Happiness has.
I do not recollect a single toy or other gadget on the sun-porch, just Nana and her imagination. The woman who could get me to accept a plastic parrot as a pet could do anything with nothing.
I am sitting in my home office tonight looking at my not-so-real parrot put there to remind me of Nana. It makes me laugh to remember and realize that we cannot lose.
We look doomed to bad politics and hard times. Nana grew up with Stalin and Hitler across the water and demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin polluting our politics. Americans were joining the Communist Party USA and we had a homegrown Nazi movement!
Nana won.
Nana prayed, did her duty, and wrote hymns. She knew the limits to what one person could do and did what she could. Mostly, she was good, decent, and joyful herself. Her faith was tested by bad people, hypocrites, and mocked by fundamentalists and theological liberals.
She refused both extremes for the sane, the humane, the Biblical. She was creative. . . and loved God. When the culture demanded she change God’s law, she helped create an alternative culture: hymns, poems, stories, a family.
God help me, but I prefer her “folk culture” to most of the educated fools who thought Stalin’s Russia was the future or that called ugliness art and worshiped it. She got more beauty out of a plastic parrot than Soviet realist painters got out of all of the fabulous wealth of Russian culture.
I think that part of that sanity was knowing what was possible and making do when the possible did not include what might be wished. She knew that when “He who could, did not, it must be better so.”
Mostly, Nana transformed what she had into something better. She could take a plastic parrot and make it sort-of-real. She could take pinto beans and make them tasty. Don’t get me started on her meatloaf. Nana could not lose, because she kept living. Her sun-porch was a playroom, or a solarium, or a conservatory, or a library, or a place where I tried to build an Egyptian temple out of the contents of a desk.
Once I read an atheist complaining about “imaginary gods” and the Christian imagination. This was a fair complaint if one must be an atheist. As my Nana taught me: God has given humanity an imagination that can transform anything. The atheist imagined we had invented God, but in fact God enables us to joyfully invent everything else.
God allows an Oxford professor to take an exam book and scribble: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit . . . ”
God allows a poet to peer at the stars and create the divine Comedy.
God let my Nana make lawful magic with only a plastic parrot and a soul created in His image.
Cheer up! Look about you! Create beauty, fun, and joy. Nothing can defeat us if we will allow the Divine imagination to take even the ugly things, our own great depressions, and make them beautiful.
I just pointed out to The Professor, the parrot hanging on my bookcase, the simple truth: We cannot lose. Give us a plastic parrot and a sun-porch and we will find our fun.
Ha!
———————-
*Readers of Plato will note that my Nana was preparing me for Timaeus.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In