Puff and Jackie Paper

For many, many years I have wondered about Peter Yarrow’s mention of “a land called Honah Lee,” in that silly old song he wrote about a dragon named Puff.

Just yesterday I was wondering as I wandered along the shoreline of Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii.

While vacationing on the north shore of Kauai I had been feeling a little constricted by the touristy setup there. It was obstructing my sense of adventure.

So, busting out of conventionality, so stealthily did I violate the boundaries of tourist propriety by launching into an unauthorized jungle trek.

Past the condos and the pool and the shuffleboard court and the boats-for-rent and the obligatory paraphenalia of predictable recreation, I stepped stealthily into a kapu area of overgrown, untended wild Hawaiian hoohah! 

Through broadleaf wild flora damp with recent rain I did venture, stooping beneath gangly trees, tromping around some ancient black volcanic boulders and fearlessly bounding over others, I hazarded the uncharted course I had serendipitously set for myself, plodding along the secret shore, and footprinting wet brown sand, I splashed forth  through shallow wavelets along the neglected eastern edge of Hanalei Bay.  This untamed pocket of Hawaiian paradise has somehow proliferated between two resortified developments of American flimflam.

’T’was then the dragon entered my mind:

"Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea,

and frolicked in the autumn mists of a land called Honah Lee."

Here was I, perchance, sauntering adventurously through the last wild boundary of Hanalei Bay, maybe a little like the legendary Puff in that old classic Peter, Paul and Mary song:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15pxWUXvLY

Within the deep recesses of Baby Boomer recall, Puff the Magic Dragon still yet  blows through, across an ocean of imagination. Can you hear the tale?

"Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff

and brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail;

Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff's gigantic tail."

Once upon a time, when there was as yet no jet-plane, no cruise-boat, no trans-Pacific ocean liner. . . long, long ago while approaching an island far, far away, during an age in which the only transport to these remote islands of Hawaii was by sailing ship. . .

"Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,

and brought him (from highly developed, civilized countries far, far away) "strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff."

Do kids these days even know about strings and sealing wax? This is ancient legend stuff. I mean, who uses strings and ceiling wax these days? Who folds an envelope and closes it and then affixes the back flap with a buttoned string and a blob of richly-colored wax impressed with a regal insignia?

Nobody I know of. You?

These were communicative implements of a by-gone age, when persons of certain authority or rank used strings and ceiling wax to assure a remote recipient that the letter or parcel being hand-delivered had originated with the accredited sender.

Such strings and sealing wax were used in centuries long gone, when mighty sailing ships voyaged halfway around the globe from London or Lisbon or Boston or some such port of great commerce.

Those majestic ocean-going vessels would arrive with pomp and fanfare at many  an exotic destination along the way, where fabled creatures inhabited magical shores, places where a fast-industrializing world had only recently managed to  impose  its rigid demands of productivity, efficiency and conformity on clueless, unsuspecting noble savages such as Hawaiians were when all this commercializing globalization had only just begun. 

Puff the Dragon was the quintessential  wild uncivilized creature of old; he held sway over that formerly vast, untamed region where primeval legends prevailed, as yet unspoiled by modern mediocrity, a time and place where magic and myth, not capitalizing pragmatism, still reigned supreme.

So, in the 1950’s-60’s televised commercialized USA where young Baby Boomer imaginations ran wild with the likes of Mickey and Minnie and Davy Crockett and the Jetsons and the Flintstones . . .

Little Jackie Paper, the nascent civilized child, found Puff among his privileged playthings. And letting his imagination run wild, he frolicked with Puff in the autumn mists of a land called Honah Lee.

For a few years, he made play of Puff— until young Jackie decided to move on to bigger and better pursuits . . . baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, Elvis and the Beatles, Mustangs and Volkswagens,  Lost in Space and lost in purple haze,  caught up in fantasy and privileged college days, gathered up in protests and rockfests and counterculture forays, and eventually outgrowing even all that stuff and finally picking up the better “toys” of governments and companies and  corporations . . .

"A dragon lives forever; not so little boys.

painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.

One grey night it happened; Jackie Paper came no more,

and Puff that magic dragon ceased his fearless roar."

Surely we now understand this about Peter Yarrow’s classic song of forsaken childhood innocence: In the end, Puff ceased his roar because . . .

Jackie ceased his playing. The roaring voice that had bellowed was not Puff's at all; it was young Jackie's intonation of Puff’s imagined roar.

Remembering this old tune while trudging along Hanalei bay. . . dredges up old memories.  My feeling is that the quaint longevity of this simple song slips up from beneath the surface of a sea deeper  than mere child's play.

It is a longing for the past; it is a vague recollection from our collective vault of  wishes and dreams; it is a pining away for a former age of mankind, a time when the people who were in charge of things were benevolent and empathetic, a Camelot time before the brouhaha of democracy, a Shangri-La time before the anarchy of revolutions, before the abuses of communism. . . a simpler, Arcadia time before everything got so complicated and leaders were not so self-infatuated, a time when . . .

"Noble kings and princes would bow whenever they came;

pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name."

 

  King of Soul

Nora's Amazing Life

The Russian revolution was not like our American one.

Just how different the two were can be understood if you read Nora's book about how she left the Soviet Union in 1922.

https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Heart-Childs-Journey-Revolutionary-ebook/dp/B00GT3BZ2E

The world's first communist revolution was imposed on Russia in 1917 by a group called Bolsheviks. Motivated and instructed by the theories of Karl Marx, these insurrectionists developed their tactics and strategies under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin.

A major component of their revolutionary plan was large-scale redistribution of Russian lands, businesses and all other assets. The disruptive effects of that communist reprogramming of an entire nation are glaringly evident in Nora Percival's first-person account.

To read about such things in history books, or in Dr. Zhivago, is one thing.

To read about it from the eyewitness perspective of a child is quite another.

One of Nora Percival's most traumatic losses during that time was the loss of her Mishka bear, a dearly beloved doll that we would think of as a teddy bear.

But a more significant trauma in the big picture of her life was the four-year separation from her father, at the age tender age of three. The disruption and displacement of their family ultimately demanded her mother's life--her mother, the delicate woman whose favorite activity was playing Chopin and Debussy on the piano.

Her father had been a successful factory-owner in czarist times. But his business prowess was a threat to the new regime. The revolutionary government was busy rearranging, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, the entire structure of land use, industry development and job assignment in the Russia of the 1920's. When Papa discerned the destructive program that would be imposed on his business and his life, he felt compelled to act in the best protective interests of his family; he left Russia, to establish a path in which his wife and daughter would later follow. By a round-the-world route, he wound up here in America.

His departure, and the family's suffering and deprivation under bureaucratic Bolshevik tyranny, are the stuff of Nora's amazing story, a truly historic memoir. Her account of the long, torturous trip from Russia to New York presents not only a clear picture of her personal triumph over adverse circumstances, but also a clear picture of the world-wide swell of immigration to America that happened during that era.

This final testament of Nora Lourie Percival's childhood odyssey, penned in the latter years of her 102-year life, is an amazing testimony of her personal triumph. But it is much more significant than a personal memoir. The book presents an historic, though contemporarily relevant, view of that very disruptive era of world history. Here's an authentic, insider account of the tribulations that compelled so many wayfarers to pass beneath Lady Liberty and then embark at Ellis Island to partake of our burgeoning American liberty.

Nora's writerly skills are precise and highly developed, nascent during a perilous youth in which reading three languages had become her best escape from the perpetual ordeal of fleeing post-revolutionary Russia. Having lost her little Mishka-bear, young Nora took refuge in reading. Her lyrical writing reflects an exceptional conversion of that childhood literacy into a phenomenal story in the annals of world history.

You should read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Heart-Childs-Journey-Revolutionary-ebook/dp/B00GT3BZ2E

Smoke

The Child's Laughter

Why here's a sudden torrent of joy

spouting from a toddler boy,

an eruption of laughter spontaneous

provoked by his cousin's zaniness!

Where in heaven's name could it come from?



It's as if this untrained burst of mirth

hath bursted from some reservoir beneath the earth

maybe from some fountain of amusement so vast

that its flood comes sloshing so fast!



There must be some great ocean of mirth

that preceded the boy's recent birth

a love from which his joy suddenly rises

like in a carnival of silly prizes.



Evidence it is, I think, of some vast wellbeing unseen,

as if it's spurting from a divine dream!

This bright shower of silly serendipity

must be a substance of the happiness we hope will be,

and now we suddenly see.

Yes! now so joyously we hear

a perfect laughter that casts out all fear.

Glass half-Full