Midlife Meditation

Once upon a time, there was a children's novel entitled The Hobbit. It was a whimsical fantasy adventure about a small person, a hobbit, recruited by other small people, dwarves, and one tall person, a wizard, to go on a quest for a lost treasure. Along the way, there were battles with trolls, orcs, goblins, giant spiders and, eventually, a dragon. At the conclusion of this fantasy adventure was an all too realistic war for the treasure. And then the hobbit returned home. The novel works perfectly well as a self-contained work of fiction. The author, JRR Tolkien, drew on a much larger work, the history of Middle Earth, a realm he spent his entire life creating. The Hobbit  and  The Lord of the Rings are all that he ever published from this work, but since his death in 1973 his family has issued volume upon volume of "unfinished tales," gleaned from the mountains of backstory material he had written but never submitted. I've read some of this stuff, and frankly...

When I was in nursery school (what they used to call preschool, back in the olden days), my favorite toy was a plastic Noah's ark, complete with plastic Noah, plastic Emzarah (Noah's wife), and two each plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic lions, plastic tigers, plastic et cetera. When my own children were of preschool age (because that's what we called it in the not so olden days), they had their own plastic Noah's playset, though this one was bigger and cuter, probably made by Fisher Price or Playschool. I spent many a happy hour with mine, and my kids did with theirs, walking the animals up the ramp and onto the boat, floating it off in the air, perhaps even in the bathtub, never stopping to think about this: The artist's name is Flora Tucinovic, the title is "Accurate Noah's Ark," and it depicts quite well the part of the story that we don't tell our children, because it really is a horrible, ghastly, abominable tale of global genoci...