(42) The little boy with glasses

No, I never thought I would have created a mythology. I guess the best way to answer all your immediate questions is by telling you in detail all there is to know from the very beginning. Then I'll answer more questions about the transition period.

It was out in the country.The area was dominated by cornfields for the pigs in the huge double-storied pigsty and for all the chickens in the huge multi-storied hen houses. Whatever was left of the corn was for the people.

Crows were a nuisance as they came in loud raiding parties to eat.Nothing compares to the first lights of day in the country. It was on one of these fine summer mornings, playing near one of the cornfields beside the house, that I first met the little boy with glasses and that black elastic band to keep them from falling. He must have been about five years old.

The youngest of a family who lived further down the road to the left, he was forbidden to play at the farm because he nearly got himself run over once by a big tractor.Since these accidents do happen, to prevent one, they kept him away till he was old enough to be careful about such things.

He was there that morning because his house is just across the cornfield from where I was staying, at my aunt's. One of the kids who lived on the immediate farm—there were about five families managing the farm—one of those kids, who wasn't always nice, told me something about that boy.

We weren't alone; there was much playing and running around, but through it all, what I understood was that once, a little while ago it seems, while it was raining so much, the families gathered all to one house for safety.

Well, on the way, the little boy, maybe out of instinct or duty, went into the cornfield and laid a good dozen eggs in a hurry at a safe spot.Upon hearing that, an image was instantly produced in my child's imagination of that little boy, in the pouring rain, with his shirt and glasses with the elastic band, laying his eggs in a hurry, with a little saying at the bottom:

--"He laid his eggs in a hurry."

A perfect illustration for a child's book. This is how, exactly twenty years later, this very image from my mind, with the saying at the bottom, I contributed, drawn out in colour along with a rhyme.I was sure to add the quote

"He laid his eggs in a hurry."

It was for one of my friends, for his "New Child Rhyme Anthology." Not "new" as in contemporary, he specified, just new ones, compiled this century, along with illustrations. I had the great joy of finally seeing it with my own eyes in a book—just the way I had always pictured it, a little jewel of its own in such a child rhyme treasury.

This is where my influence ceases and mythology takes over. In that same locality, there were grandparents who died when their house burnt down one night. They went to heaven, and all the candy burned. Grandparents make good saints, so it was said they blessed the animals, the farm, the people, and the corn. Each grain is deeply blessed.

The illustration, it seems, provides an opportunity for establishing a practice representing the growth of nature. Each year after the harvest, a bowl of eggs is brought deep into the cornfield by a little boy with glasses, and the bowl is left there to be taken by nature.

It is said that with the last egg leaving, the little boy's spirit, who had laid those eggs long ago, would rise to heaven and slowly pull the corn out of the ground to its towering height at harvest.His instinct never failed, so if a bowl of eggs was left to disappear one by one, he could rise to heaven and perform his duty. An antique myth will have borrowed an illustration from a child's rhyme to perpetuate itself anew for a while in this guise, in this very day and age