THE POWERS OF BABBLE

I suspect God was in a mood of particular pique the day He summoned me into being, perhaps fed up with all the annoying requests from the humans who never seemed happy with their situations. He persevered nonetheless, being God and all - adding this trait, subtracting that ability, enhancing this talent, fine-tuning what would be my emotional constitution – and sent me on my way earthward.

Earth was, and remains, a shock. Not a pleasant one which would be more like a surprise. No, from the get-go I knew viscerally and indubitably that I was not like the hordes of humanity I encountered immediately after birth, and yet encounter today. I wasn’t long in my earthly abode when I began to have serious suspicions that God just may have left out a final, yet evidently important, aspect of my makeup. I couldn’t talk. Actually, I could talk. It was just very hard and caused me innumerable problems through the decades.

Perhaps to avoid the unease of having to verbalize much, He gave me counterbalance. I could write – rings ‘round anybody - and, so, from childhood all the way through my 25-year career in corporate communications and onward, I did just that. I can’t imagine what career path I’d have taken without written expression.

I’ve forgiven God for robbing me of the social arts, deeply grateful for the gift of self-expression in my own way. I was composing little ditties and rhymes before I could actually ‘write’. And I had sufficient musical talent to play instruments and accompany myself in singing the songs I’d composed.

The beauty of nature and animals, mostly dogs and horses, was writ large in my first childish forays into the illustrious preserve of authors. It all came so easily and it was a rare moment that I wasn’t composing or rhyming or imagining song harmonies in my head. My protracted silences were accepted though never understood. My mother, however, could empathize and, being of similar proclivities, would sometimes join me in reciting or singing my written bits and bobs.

I recall distinctly her telling me one of my poems reminded her of a babbling brook whose trickling sound she loved. Not used to compliments of any sort, that one propelled me onward in my relentless composing, if only for myself.

But then came Grade Three and a poetry competition sponsored by the local newspaper to select one poem per grade across the city. You can, perhaps, imagine my exhilaration and excitement. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced and, immediately, I set about the task, finalizing my entry within half an hour. “The Brook” I titled it and, as the name suggested, it described – in rhyming couplets – the babbling brook I had in my mind’s eye, the one my mother had so appreciated.

And it won for my age group!

Ecstasy is far too meager a word to describe my jubilation. I was eight years old and had published a poem!

More than 60 years on, with a quarter century of uninspiring, drab business writing under my belt, I’m still creating little poems and ditties, still mostly about animals and nature, still mostly in my head. It seems I’ve remained true to the painfully shy child who found her voice only through the written form.

I know now I had always known what I wanted. The years brought professional success, but I was never comfortable and felt compromised lending my talents to the corporate world; so happily left that grey workplace behind.

From wherever my beloved and adored mother may be, I hope she can hear the tiny waterfall I’ve created in the pond my father dug years ago on the rural property where I still live.

It’s been for her all along.