Hope in a spoonful of sugar

When I was nine I was a huge Mary Poppins fan. Now that I’m nearing 55 and with a lifetime of manly pursuits behind me it seems like a silly thing to admit. But when I was nine and adjusting to a strange new adopted home the story of Mary Poppins was invaluable to me. I saw the movie first and then bought the soundtrack LP. It was the first record I ever bought and I listened to it over and over. I learned all the words to all the songs and could never seem to get enough of it.
It drove my new family nuts, of course. Everyday that music poured from the living room with me desperately trying to sing along to A Spoonful of Sugar, Chim Chim Cheree and the ubiquitous Supercallafragileistic. I was never the most musical person in the world and the caterwauling that came out of me then must have been really irritating. I don’t know what there was about it all that captivated me then, only that I know it made me happy.
Happiness was in limited supply in my adopted home. In my first year I moved twice and that meant two new schools, two bouts without friends, two periods of trying to fit in, two rounds of loneliness and a ton of new rules to learn to follow at home. It was tough. But there was also a new code of discipline and conduct that I needed to learn to follow and when I didn’t there was a new system of corporal punishment I needed to adjust to. It was painful and I was awfully sad a lot of the time.
But when Mary Poppins blew in on the south wind with her carpet bag, parasol and sensible shoes something changed for me. She knew how to take of children, how to feed their imaginations and bring out their best ideas and most personal dreams. I craved that and I let it fill me. The London she landed in was as staid and uninventive and rigid as my new home and I identified very strongly with the feelings of the two kids in that movie.
Once under Mary’s spell they flourished. I will never forget the laughter that erupted from me at the sight of their room being magically straightened and neatened or penguins dancing or a formerly bitter old man being elevated to the ceiling of a bank boardroom by the transformative power of a laugh. Mary Poppins brought a loving magic into the lives of those two kids and I came to love the movie and the music because I craved that same magic.
Inter-racial adoption isn’t a bad thing when there’s genuine love involved. In my case there wasn’t. I wasn’t adopted for me or for what I needed in my life. I was adopted to fill a need in someone else’s life and to provide what they needed, what they lacked or lost. Then I was forced to become who they needed me to be and not who I was. I wasn’t created to be a white Presbyterian Scot. I was created to be a male, Ojibway human being. That’s the never-changing fact of things.
But in that home I was never presented with an idea of myself as an Ojibway, as Indian or First Nations. Instead, I was dressed in whiteman’s clothes, taught white man’s protocol, habits, behaviors and made to feel like a failure when I didn’t measure up. I was berated for those failings, put down, judged harshly, beaten and abused. The Indian in me was churched off, schooled off, shamed off and beaten off. It was lonely and terrifying a lot of the time.
But Mary Poppins gave me hope. It was the first time in my life that I saw how powerful and healing the imagination could be or how a simple story well-told could rearrange things, make the impossible possible. Oh sure, I knew at nine that penguins couldn’t dance or carousels come alive or that every chimney sweep in old London could sing and dance and cavort like a Broadway star. But it was the magic that touched me. It was the magic in believing that things could change, be different, be better.
When you’re a kid you need to believe in magic. For me the idea that someone could drop out of the sky and change things gave me hope. Hope is magic. Hope enables you to hang on one more day, to carry on despite everything being dark around you, to come to grips with life, grit your teeth and move forward. Hope allows you to be available when magic shows up as it always does. It’s the spoonful of sugar.