I read a book, when I was a kid, about a boy who is blinded in an accident.

As he is learning how to live with his new circumstances, his mom takes him out for ice cream one day. As he is eating the ice cream, he feels her slip some glasses on his face.

Like a thunderclap he realizes that these must be sunglasses. That his eyes are now ugly as well as useless, and must be hidden. The ice cream falls to the floor forgotten.

Do you wonder why, at age 50, I recall that particular vignette out of that particular book? I wonder, too, and have often wondered over the years, as often as it came to mind.

There is a certain pathos about it, but to me for some reason, the pathos revolves around the ice cream. It is tremendously sad to imagine being both blind and ugly, of course. But it’s as though the only thing his mother could bring to bear against it was ice cream. And the inevitable, total failure of a scoop of ice cream to compensate for blindness and disfigurement is the saddest thing of all. It redoubles the tragedy.

I figured out that much, but still I have wondered- why has this little scene lingered on in my mind, over all these years? Out of all the things I’ve forgotten, surely a whole pack of them deserve to be remembered more than this. Yet, those I forgot, and this I remember.

Today I was thinking about my childhood and a Mother’s day came to mind, one during the years we were alone, after my father and before my stepfather. I only had a little money, being a kid, and not a lot of ideas. I went to K Mart and looking around, I found a package of pot scrubbers- you know, the abrasive things you use to scour crud off your pans when you are washing them. As I recall, I almost bought them, and then some merciful fairy of childhood whispered in my ear that the gift of something to scrub pots with, was unlikely to have the desired affect. Didn’t really telegraph gratitude, affection, and appreciation, you know? Best I recall, I bought something else instead, and I hope I recall correctly.

As I was musing on this today, the next thing I thought was, geez, what if I did get the pot scrubbers? So what? Aren’t kids likely to act like kids? Can an 8 or 9 or 10 year old be expected to know better? Wouldn’t Mom have laughed at it?

I don’t know. I think, subliminally, I was of the opinion that she needed us to be her husband, and she was in no shape to deal with normal kid behavior, or to laugh it off. It’s not like she was going to get a dozen red roses, and 3 pot scrubbers. Nope, just the pot scrubbers. So we had to do better than that. And as I think on “we”, it seems like it was “me.”

Mom relied a lot on Bud and he had to take up a huge amount of slack because Dad had left us. I have a lot of gratitude to Bud for that, but he didn’t seem to take up any emotional slack. Just changing light bulbs and snow tires and things. He had been thrust into the job because his father didn’t feel like doing it, and he had an understandably terrible attitude about it. Whatever Andy was doing to try and deal with the situation made him useless as an emotional support. He was a demanding emotional drain. And Betty was a girl. How could she be a surrogate husband? So in my mind, little Winky had to pretty much be his father, for his mother. AND he had to compensate for Andy and Bud.

Yup, I think “co-dependent” is the right word.

Then it struck me. I realized why that vignette stuck so, and struck so. I was the ice cream. I was the hopelessly inadequate and only available coping mechanism. I had to fail, and when I did fail, the enormity of the tragedy was redoubled.

All this actually happened while I was day-dreaming in church (don’t worry, Joost-- I got the sermon). It was during a song and I had to stop singing for about a verse. I was literally dumb-struck. That was it. The thing in the book fit, hand-in-glove, with the emotional pattern of my childhood, and resonated like a gong. It’s still ringing, FORTY YEARS LATER.

After I grew up I was able to think about this period of time more objectively, and I concluded that I probably was kidding myself at the time; that things were not that emotionally fragile and the weight I thought I was bearing really did not rest on me. Then some things happened, in my adult life, which pretty well persuaded me that I had been correct in the first place; correct at the time. So age, wisdom, rumination and empirical evidence finally caught up with what a 10 year old knew perfectly well at the time. The human mind is incredible. The conscious human mind is mildly impressive, too.

So, what was all that about? What is God shaping me for? How is He going to make that into something holy and glorious instead of pathological? I’m waiting to find out. It sure does give you an eye for the underdog and the outsider. But it also has a tendency to tinge the other parts of life with a certain moroseness; a certain air of futility. Of inadequacy to cope or to satisfy. It’s like you are able to tell how any given thing is like the ice cream. So perhaps it is how God gave me eyes to see that the universe demands the existence of God. Perhaps that air of failure and death is what sent me life.

“A sheep—if it eats little bushes, does it eat flowers, too?”

“A sheep,” I answered, “eats anything it finds in its reach.”

“Even flowers that have thorns?”

“Yes, even flowers that have thorns.”

“Then the thorns- what use are they?”

I did not know. At that moment I was very busy trying to unscrew a bolt that had got stuck in my engine. I was very much worried, for it was becoming clear to me that the breakdown of my plane was extremely serious.

“The thorns—what use are they?”

The little prince never let go of a question, once he had asked it. As for me, I was upset over that bolt. And I answered with the first thing that came into my head:

“The thorns are of no use at all. Flowers have thorns just for spite!”

“Oh!”

There was a moment of complete silence. Then the little prince flashed back at me, with a kind of resentfulness:

“I don’t believe you! Flowers are weak creatures. They are naïve. They reassure themselves as best they can. They believe that their thorns are terrible weapons…”

The little prince was now white with rage.

“The flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years. For millions of years the sheep have been eating them just the same. And is it not a matter of consequence to try to understand why the flowers go to so much trouble to grow thorns which are never of any use?”

- The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery