La la la…Pied Piper House!

Gawd I love to google.  Here’s a great hint at how ancient I am.  This morning the Pied Piper theme song would not leave my poor brain in peace.  It’s from a tv show from the 60’s, which means I have a ridiculously weird memory.  Plus there’s the added fact that even then I was way too old to be watching such nonsense, but the CBC did not give us a lot of scintillating choices and we got only one channel.  So we watched whatever popped up on the screen and filed it all away in the dark recesses of our brains only to have it come screaming to the forefront one hot summer day fifty years later in an attempt to drive us batshit crazy.   The Animal Farm segment was my favourite with actual live animals supposedly narrating stories from miniature barnyard sets, featuring Rupert the Rat, Bessie the Bunny, Kookie the Kitten, Harriet Hen, Freddie Frog, Calvin Racoon and Charlotte Cow.  And yes, I googled their names for the sake of accuracy.

And also the words to the song.  So that I could stop merely humming the bits where the lyrics eluded me.

Oooooohhhhh……Come with me, come and see

All the wonders there will be

In my stories, in  my songs

And everything where fun belongs.

We’ll meet heroes, giants bold

Visit lands both hot and cold

Have magic tricks to shiver your skin,

Laughs galore with animals in

Our world of fun – Pied Piper House!

(repeat ad nauseam in a deep booming opera type manner)

There he is!!  Remember him??  He always wore that dumb hat with the stupid fake flower!  Man, they just don’t make television programs like that anymore.  Come with me, come and see, bang my head against a tree.  I may have to resort to such extreme measures to free my mind of this torturous little ditty.

Inspired by My Favorite Book

“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.” (Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale)

Sometimes I find myself on the very brink of telling someone things that I have never told anyone before. The words are forming themselves into sentences in my head and dancing around in my brain in gleeful anticipation of bursting forth, of flying from my mouth. Panic swells inside me. I will not be able to stop them once they start, and then I will never be able to snatch them back.

I force myself to hesitate and wait for them to recede in numbing slow motion. Their impatience to be heard at last begins to fade and the words themselves drift blissfully away into mist and the recollections of that past are gone. Perhaps they are lost forever. Please, please let them be lost forever. The truth would be too painful for my listener to bear, and what good could ever come of that? I will tell her a bedtime story instead, containing little chips of the truth, but not enough of them to mar the happy ending.