By: Janice Lindsay
It was the saddest song I had ever heard.
“My Sweet Little Alice-Blue Gown,” always sung by a woman, told the story of a lovely blue silk dress “with little forget-me-nots placed here and there.” Wearing that gown made the wearer feel as if she were “walking on air.” But here’s the sad part: That dress was now wilted, worn out, in short, gone.
Merely hearing the first few strains of “My Sweet Little Alice…” would plunge my 3-year-old soul into a deep well of grief, not to mention loud bawling.
This was quite inconvenient for my parents, who were pianists and likely to be involved in community talent shows where, as sure as dresses wear out, some lady would want to sing about it. So at the strategic moment, a kind adult would escort unsuspecting little Janice to a room where she could not hear the music, and wait with her until the danger had passed.
But this inconvenience was slight compared with that happened when I reached kindergarten.
The well-meaning teachers herded us into the auditorium, with kindergarteners in the front rows, to watch a move about how to escape a fire.
In the movie, the house was on fire. What if our house was on fire and I couldn’t find my mother? Once again, I foundered in the well of grief. An understanding teacher removed weeping Janice from the audience and sat with me elsewhere until classes resumed.
I reacted with tears at the first bell heralding every harmless fire drill. So, when a fire drill was due to erupt, a sympathetic grown-up fetched Janice from her classroom, walked her to the principal’s office, and stayed with her until the children filed back inside.
The inconvenience of childhood grief sometimes happened at home, but not always with me. I have a younger sister.
I don’t know why our parents decided to replace their old kerosene-fueled stove. It might have had something do with the fact that little Cheryl, always a curious and adventuresome toddler, seemed to be working on a plan to drink the kerosene.
Out went the old stove, in came the new. It was Cheryl’s turn in the well of grief. She could not bear the loss of our old familiar stove.
Our wise and clever mother, a devoted truth-teller except in emergencies, improvised. She told us an old man and woman who lived nearby didn’t have a stove and were too poor to buy one. They would have ours.
This act of charity calmed my sister. Fortunately, she never asked to visit that poor, old couple.
Later, our mother reported that Bambi’s mother did not, in face, die from a hunter’s bullet, but was merely wounded. She was captured, healed, and went to a zoo. When Bambi was older, he was captured, too, and, by happy coincidence, found himself at the same zoo.
Cheryl and I didn’t know, then, how lucky we were that our fears of loss were imaginary, or that our grown-ups, even as they coped with their own more substantial terrors, still tried to protect us from our inconvenient, childish ones. Their tactics of removal and improvisation gained us some growing time.
In the song, whenever the lady wore her sweet little Alice-blue gown into town during those glorious years when it was still wearable, “the world seemed to smile all around.”
The world never really smiles all around. The luckiest children are those who are granted a few early years to deal with their imaginary losses, in preparation for the time when they must contend with real ones.
Contact jlindsay@tidewater.net.
