By Gary Topping–
Annabel, the cute little girl across the street, invited my wife over to show off her new bunk bed and to recite “Humpty-Dumpty” for her. Later, we reflected on the durability of nursery rhymes like that, which we had when we were kids and which were presumably already old even when our grandparents were young. And we reflected further that some of them contain moral lessons: “Humpty-Dumpty,” for example, warns us that some actions have irreversible consequences (a lesson I had to learn the hard way a few times!).
I had one of my own, which my wife had never heard. When I was about Annabel’s age, my dad used to hold me on his lap and recite the names of each of the buttons on his vest:
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.
What neither my dad nor I realized was that he was reciting a microcosm of the society within which we were living on the southwestern Oregon coast. We were aware of the rich men, although we didn’t know any of them, and there were certainly plenty of poor men. There were also plenty of alcoholics who lived in a state of dereliction that would probably qualify them as beggars. And there were thieves: my own cousin lived a miserable life of petty crime until he finally gave up and killed himself. My grandfather was a lawyer, so we knew about them; in fact, the property my dad purchased was a tax foreclosure, so he would have had some legal dealings to get that. And we had a doctor who, incredibly to us these days, used to puff on a pipe while he examined us.
Finally, we had Indians. I never knew a chief, but among my playmates and schoolmates were members of various coastal tribes. They had little consciousness of their identity, for the Red Power component of the civil rights movement was far in the future (once it did happen it was a powerful force, but I was long since gone by then). Of other races and ethnicities there were very few: one of my best friends with whom I went all the way through school was the only Jewish kid in town, and although there were always Japanese sailors in port, they stayed only briefly and the language barrier kept us from getting to know any of them. I don’t remember ever having seen a black person until I left home and joined the Navy, and then, of course, I got to know plenty of them. But at least we had the Indians, and they were in there right beside the doctors and lawyers.
As I say, I didn’t know it at the time, but I got a very important, if subliminal, message from that little rhyme. It was a message of universal humanity, that we are all equal before God, and that the human community is composed of all types of people, each of us with our own role to play, and that all are deserving of our love, even the beggars and the thieves.
