The Unseen Hand

It would be difficult to imagine a better childhood than I had.  I mean it could have been better if I hadn't been a scrawny weakling -- but as far as other things go it was in retrospect hard to imagine a better and more interesting one.

Summers were especially wonderful.  We moved out of town to a local lake where as our first jobs we caught baby turtles and sold them to the tourists at the nearby resort hotels.  We swam, we fished, we went on expeditions to catch turtles. 

I wound up in a twelve hour drive with my older brother and we were reminiscing about the summers.  We talked about our Great Aunt that frequently came to visit and would gather all of her great nephews and nieces around to tell them stories at a little cottage she rented. 

In the course of the conversation, I commented about one thing that I did not like about my childhood and that was naps.  I said "What was the deal with Mom and naps anyway!"  He looked at me and said, "You didn't know?"  I said, "I guess not."

He then went on to explain that in our earliest years we and our cousins and couple families with kids our age from away who summered at the lake were kept in a type of isolation.  The schedules including the swimming, expeditions, and naps were all part of a program.  He said it was something our parents got right (he has a different viewpoint on the quality of parenting we had, than I).  They were guided by an unseen hand -- one that I never recall my mother ever talking about.  It was a power that put fear in their hearts and a structured (though wonderful) plan for our activities.

It appears that unknownst to me, that a polio epidemic kept sweeping through our hometown where we lived in the winter.  They didn't really know how to treat it, but the general idea with regards to prevention was to keep your kids away from large groups of kids, make sure they exercised, and got plenty of rest.  An unseen hand that brought tragedy throughout our area -- brought wonderful childhood summers to my brother and I.  And after it faded from view, our parents and the other adults involved were so caught up in the lifestyle that they kept it up throughout my childhood.

How could such a fearsomely awful disease cause such blessings to me?