(posted 2002)

 

I do this from memory on the morning of Christmas Eve.

 

The modest sculpture on today’s Lout cover is from the frieze of a church here in Boulder at the northeast corner of 14^th and Spruce.  It is tucked away around the corner from a main entrance, facing north.

 

It was done by one Louis Teets, a competent craftsman of whose other work I know nothing.  Teets traveled, and had been in Kansas some years previous to his late nineteenth century job here in Boulder.  On the bleak plains of our eastern neighbor, he had lost his toddler daughter Lula a few years previous.  The church has cast this modest embellishment as an ‘angel child in stone,’ a memorial to his daughter, and it is that.  The thing that gets me is that the little girl looks to be about four or five; in other words, the age she would have been at the work’s completion, not her death.

 

Sweet, cloying perhaps, but so what? 

 

If you read the history of this nation, or human history, you find that daughters, especially in harsher areas of the planet, were, well, not the preferred gender.  If someone was going to spend time and effort, food and money raising a child, it’d be better if it was male and could help with the hard work.  In some areas of the planet, village elders gather at birth and decide if the child is ‘weak’ or ‘defective’ and kill it if not, generally by exposure so the guilt of the deed can be edged aside.  Oddly, populations seem to find females more ‘weak.’  Some cultures made no pretense of objectivity.  In the islands of northern Japan, the culture allows female children to be killed at the father’s whim at birth.   There are others…….

 

Don’t feel morally superior.  All through Europe, and probably the United States, it was common.  So common a specific type of ghost, the utburg, haunted mothers in Scandanavia.  The utburgs were the spirits of children – almost all female – exposed to the elements.  And then re-read Victor Hugo and/or the Philosophes and wonder where all these abandoned children at the French convents came from.  Don’t think being a nun was an objective choice for many girls two centuries ago.  And what percentage of SIDS deaths, so called, are female?  What percentage of unexplained or suspicious infant deaths are girls, or what percentage of abandoned infants?

 

In short, till recently many cultures, perhaps all cultures, viewed females as an expense.  In any case, the death or abandonment of children – and the death of little girls – was so common that probably everybody had a sad memory of a little face suddenly gone from their childhood.

 

Louis Teets was different.  I know nothing of him except that he snuck in a memorial to his daughter held in imagination for some years.  Virtually everyone else I mention this to looks on this unimpressive artistic achievement and says “That’s boilerplate, a standard sculpture he copied and stuck up there.  He isn’t chiseling from memory, nitwit….’   For me, his skill or taste isn’t the issue.   He missed his little girl, and if she couldn’t grow up in fact, she looks to me that she was on schedule in her father’s eye either in imagination or in the selection of something to copy. 

 

I have no children, but for whatever reason, his sense of loss speaks to me.  A man who not only grieved but hurt years after his little girl, perhaps just settled into the Terrible Twos, had been taken from him. 

 

Swimming in the pretensions of our species and its celebrations, especially during this season, I would briefly honor Louis Teets.  A father.

 

Merry Christmas.