When The Boy was a boy*, he did not know that nursery rhymes and fairy tales and folk songs had already lived lives stretching back centuries. When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last few years. To honor such generous gifts of craftsmanship and art, he took them in, absorbed them, never forgot them. And he did the same with other stories and songs he learned then, because he did not know the difference between a profound message from the deep past and a superficial message from yesterday.

When The Boy was no longer a boy, he knew these things. But by then it was too late; he had memorized them all, equally, the new with the old and the silly with the deep. And long after The Boy was a boy, they would chew their way out of the recesses of his mind, laying claim to his awareness when he really needed to be thinking of other things…

When The Boy was a boy, true, he sometimes wondered about the songs they learned in music class. As printed in the music books, these songs featured black-and-white cross-hatched woodcut drawings taken from ancient sources, perhaps as far back as the eighteenth century. One drawing in particular entranced him: it depicted a raucous sort of restaurant — perhaps something like a diner, furnished in oak instead of chrome — were many people were eating and laughing; they poured huge mugs of something into their mouths, and one arm of each man encircled the waist of a wench…

Many, many songs and stories came to The Boy, when he was a boy, through the small, glowing gray screen in the living room. Many of these songs and stories were brief, lasting either thirty or sixty seconds — exactly — but some were a little longer. They showed up in venues like the beginning and end of each program. And they showed up within some of the programs themselves, like… Captain Kangaroo.

(When The Boy was no longer a boy, he came to believe that the first time he heard that song must have been the moment his politics became set for life. Good old Captain.)

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* Hat tip to Peter Handke’s poem “Song of Childhood,” featured in the marvelously hypnotic voiceover for Wings of Desire. Here’s Rutger Hauer’s voice reading the English translation, over a short film crafted especially to capture the poem’s essence: