Review Assignment: I’m the Only One!

Into the Hundred Acre Wood came a fox – not a stuffed fox, a real live fox, and of course he wasn't wearing any clothes.  There were too many foxes and too few rabbits in the nearby woods in which he was born; so he decided to migrate in search of prey. As soon as he spotted Rabbit, he made a bee-line for him.  As Rabbit scurried into his hole, Tigger stepped in front of the fox and roared, and then he said, "Did that come out of me?"

"Hey, you talk too!" said the fox.

"Of course I can talk!"  said Tigger.  "We're characters in a children's story.  All animals in children's stories talk."

"I see," said the fox.  "But why are you protecting that rabbit instead of eating him?  After all, tigers are carnivores."

"I don't need to eat," said Tigger.  "You see, I'm stuffed."

"I'm stuffed too, but I love to eat!"  said Winnie the Pooh.

"You're not helping," said Tigger.

"Well, I'm not stuffed," said the fox.  "Just the opposite.  I'm hungry!"

"Well, you can always eat mice," said Tigger.

"And you're not protecting the mice too?" said the fox.

"Nah, we don't care about them." Said Owl.  "They're not part of the story.  They can't even talk.  They're too dumb."

The fox briefly entertained a thought about the IQ chauvinism of these animals but he didn't verbalize it because he didn't want them to start protecting the only prey that was available in this neck of the woods.  After he had eaten to satiation, he said, "Well, since I'm going to be living among you, I may as well introduce myself.  My name is Ronald."

"Ronald?" said Owl.  "That's a funny name.  We're all named after the kind of animals we are or the noise we make, like Eeyore the donkey.  I'm Owl, and the tiger is Tigger, and the rabbit is Rabbit, and the mother kangaroo is Kanga and her baby is Roo – all except for the bear.  His name is Winnie the Pooh."

"Yuck!" said Ronald.

"Oh, the word 'Pooh' doesn't mean what you think it does," said Owl.

"I'm glad to hear that," said Ronald.  "I almost lost my lunch.  Anyway, I too was named after the kind of animal I am.  The name Ronald is an anglicization.  When I was born, my dad named me Renard, which means fox in French. He's from Quebec."

"Do you speak French?" asked Owl.

"Yes, and Russian too.  My mom's Russian.  Now tell me, Kanga, where's Roo's father?"

"Oh, babies don't get made here the way they do in your neck of the woods," said Kanga.  "As Tigger said, this is a children's story.  Animals don't get born or grow old or die.  We always existed and always will exist."

"Hm, sort of like Fred Hoyle's steady state universe," said Ronald.  "You see, he was an astronomer who thought that..."

"Oh, bother!" interrupted Oscar the Grouch – I mean Eeyore the donkey.  "Another know-it-all.  I can stand Owl because he doesn't actually know very much, but this guy!  Sheesh!"

"My, what a low voice you have!" said Ronald.  "You could sing bass in a choir!"

"What's singing?" asked Winnie the Pooh.

Ronald demonstrated by singing "Old McDonald Had a Farm", doing accurate imitations of all the animals.

"None of us can sing," said Owl.

"That's because nobody ever taught you how to sing," said Ronald.  "Would you like me to teach you to sing?"

All the animals expressed their desire to learn to sing, and so the singing lessons began.  After quite some time, Ronald had formed them into a choir and taught them quite a few songs.  "Let's sing for Christopher Robin and his dad," said Winnie the Pooh.  And they did, ending with a song that begins "Christopher Robin goes hoppity hoppity hoppity hoppity hop".  In response, Christopher Robin began hopping all over the place.

"Wonderful!" said Christopher Robin's dad A. A. Milne.  "Where did you hear that last song?"

"I didn't hear it, I wrote it when my friends here told me about Christopher Robin," said Ronald.

"I'm so glad you came here," said Mr. Milne.  "I wrote some poems about my son and I need someone to set them to music.  I want to put out a children's record of songs.  Could you do that for me?"

"Sure thing," said Ronald.

The record sold well and brought in enough money that Mr. Milne could afford to start feeding all the animals, who liked to eat even though they didn't really have to.  All of them were happy, even Eeyore, but the happiest of all was Ronald, who was glad to have something else to eat besides mice.

Review Assignment: Childhood Days

My favourite toy when I was a pre-schooler was a toy xylophone that my mother bought for me for my second birthday.  I still remember it.  It had 15 wooden bars and it came with a wooden stick ending in a sphere with which to strike the bars.  The bars made a plinking sound when struck with the stick.  The reverberation was much shorter than the one made by the metal bars on a xylophone that I got a few years later.  The wooden xylophone had a two-octave range, not from C to C but from E to E, the highest note being a major third higher than the highest note on a piano.  I discovered that fact half a year later when I went to nursery school.  There was a piano there and, once the pianist told me the names of the notes, I made the comparison.

I began by playing random notes on my xylophone, but soon I started playing nursery rhymes on it: London Bridge is Falling Down, The Farmer in the Dell, Three Blind Mice and many others that my mother sang to me and that the pianist at the nursery school played to all of us.  My mother, who was in the kitchen at the time I started playing nursery rhymes on the xylophone, realized that I had some musical ability.  Some time thereafter, she bought me an upright piano and signed me up for piano lessons.  At that point I stopped playing with the xylophone because it was more interesting to play the piano – it had a greater range, as well as black keys for sharps and flats.  But I still remember that xylophone with a great deal of fondness.