After learning that walk-and-talk thing, the most important job you face when you’re small is making sense of the world. You have no reference points; everything is new and confusing.
Raised on Latin Masses and Gregorian chants, I tried hard when very young to put what I was hearing into some kind of familiar language. When I heard a particular chanted response, my best effort at translation was “We were all the bonnie buns.” But even at that age I knew it really didn’t make sense. So one time, at breakfast after church, I asked what “bonnie buns” were.
Mom asked me what I meant and I recited the response that I had heard in church: “We were all the bonnie buns.”
Result? Everyone at the table, especially the older siblings, laughed at me. Important lesson learned: when you ask a question, people will laugh at you.
My older sister was memorizing “Paul Revere’s Ride” for some event at school. For days and weeks, I would hear snippets of the poem: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear … On the 18th of April in ’75 … One, if by land, and two, if by sea.”
And then: “I on the opposite shore will be, ready to ride and spread the alarm, through every Middlesex village and farm.” My mind somehow inserted commas into that last phrase, so it became “every Middlesex (comma) village (comma) and farm.”
I knew what a village was (fairy tales took place in villages), I knew what a farm was (all our neighbors lived on farms), but what the heck was a “Middlesex”? One day, I asked Mom, “What is a Middlesex?”
She was probably busy doing seven other things; maybe she didn’t hear the question; or maybe she just heard the word “sex.” Who knows? I got the standard parental nonanswer: “Ask me again later when I’m not so busy.” Important lesson learned: Even your mom doesn’t want to answer your questions.
Someone read me a bedtime story, “The Owl and the Pussycat.” I heard: “They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped in a five-pound note.” Wait a minute! What’s a five-pound note? Mom was always writing little notes to herself, to remind her of things that needed to be done, so I knew all about notes. But every note I’d ever seen was on a single scrap of paper, and weighed practically nothing. How could a note weigh five pounds? By then, however, I’d learned not to ask questions, so it sat in the back of my mind: another confusing thing about the world.
Gradually I learned. Gradually the world became less confusing and things began to make some sense. Maybe not a lot of sense, but some. I learned to read well enough to read “Paul Revere’s Ride” to myself, and discovered that there are no commas in the phrase that had bothered me so much. Middlesex must be a place where those villages and farms were located. OK, that made more sense.
I eventually discovered that British money comes in “pounds.” Oh. Their “five-pound note” was like our five-dollar bill. Got it.
But what about those “bonnie buns?” Well, first I learned that in church, chants were in something called “Latin,” a language no one spoke, but everyone used in church. It was so the church could be “universal,” I learned. If a person went to Mass in any country in the world, he or she would hear the same Latin Mass and it would be like home.
A few years later, our Mass was conducted in English, and it was no longer important that it be like home in another country, because their Mass would now be conducted in their language. With no more Latin Masses and very few Gregorian chants around, I never learned what the “bonnie buns” response really was, neither in Latin nor in English translation. It didn’t matter. It got me through the service at the time and, for a moment, helped me in my effort to figure out the world. And, who knows, maybe it really was “bonnie buns.”
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