For instance, as a child, it never occurred to me to ask where I came from. From what I read now, that’s a question that every parent seems to expect and dread. (Disclaimer: I am not a parent.) LOTS of kids apparently ask it. For me, it just never came up.
On the other hand, I am told that I took a no-nonsense approach to getting an answer about whether Santa was real. Even at an early age, I was ultimately a pragmatist. After all, Santa was the source of presents, so that was Important, but the answer to where I came from wasn’t going to make much difference in my life – I was already here, so let’s move on.
I think I gave maybe 30 seconds in my entire life to pondering whether the chicken or the egg came first. Again, a question that seemed (and to be honest, seems) pretty pointless. Precedence has never mattered to me at breakfast.
However, I was recently gobsmacked when someone admitted on an online forum that in their youth, they had once thought that “this little piggy went to market” meant the piggy was grocery shopping.
[Pause … Blink … Blink.]
I realized that right up until I read that, I STILL thought that’s what that line meant. It had never occurred to me that there might be another meaning. You mean all those playful tugs on my big toe at bedtime were really some sort of Gahan Wilson fantasy that ends with my toe in an abattoir?
My mind haltingly began to consider what other double entendres were concealed in this jolly little rhyme. Soon, online research confirmed that “this little piggy had roast beef” was simply a reference to a piggy who wasn’t ready to “go to market” yet and who was being fed his barnyard buddy, Mrs. Cow, to be fattened up for … well, a trip into to town to “go shopping” with his big brother. Man, that is cold!
And when the full realization hit me of why the last piggy was screaming “wee, wee, wee,” it was like when Lila spins Mrs. Bates’s chair around in Psycho. Before that, I had always interpreted that line as a delighted piggy, joyously singing “whee, whee, whee” as he skipped gaily home.
Of course, if I had ever really thought about it, I wouldn’t have been surprised by its sinister and slightly macabre subtext. After all, I still have memories of times when we’d visit the farm where my father had been raised in southwest Georgia, and one of my aunts would sometimes take me in her lap on one of the huge old rocking chairs on the screen porch and sing nursery songs to me until I dozed off. Sometimes, the last waking words I’d hear were from one oddly comforting tune that sang softly of a cute little lamb and about “the birds and the flies, peckin’ out his eyes, poor little baby crying mama.”
After my piggy revelation, I was again reminded that back when I was growing up, the world had no trigger warnings.
Sometimes, I’m Amazed at the Lapses in my Natural Childhood Curiosity by Ed Ward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.