Bamboo People and the Borrowers

 A bit of story about Bamboo People began here ... 

A long time ago they were called Sam and Sally. Their story went like this. 

"Things and people have been left behind time and again. Like land turtles Sally and Sam found that only what they could carry mattered. People –friends, family and society in the main have had to decide whether the things that matter to their multiple chemical sensitive friends mattered to them. For half a year our two elder dears slept in their car and parked their mobile bedroom in beach parking lots, driveways and lawns of friends and family. Living public lives with an illness unknown or misunderstood isolates, and that is what it was like. Public yet invisible, illness and homelessness are conditions that our society denies. Political mumble is just so much dank air. The sky is falling on thousands of us every day and every night. Life after dark is a time when the goblins of entitlement and gentrification screen out and isolate the fragile and the sick."

 A couple poems "Sal" wrote while living in their faithful car included these:

Ness-ism

Just enough.
Enough to.
To sustain.
Sustain the light.
Lightness.
Ness-ism.
Ism without.
Without attachment.
Attachment.


Blank

Her sweet old face held me—
One face stood out among the many.
My parking lot vigil watching momona young hapa couple squeeze out of their car.
Smooth globe faces, flesh stretch the 3X tee shirt, the stretchy flowered pareau.
Plastic bags bulge with stuff pulled from Foodland Shelves.
People-persons push alcohol hand-swiped carts to the beeped open doors of vehicles. Frontiers, FAV3, Astro Vans, TRD off Road.

Your sweet old face held me in the dark, tropical night.
I notice your quilted navy coat enveloping your small frame.
Your smile, your eyes engage two brown haired heads.
Oh, I start to think…family?

Your lips make words.
They pass you.
They blank you out.
You are Kapu…
You sweet one must have uttered the unspeakable.
You with the sweet face, asked
For help.

 "Have you met the borrowers?" asked Sal of Sam.

"You mean, The Borrowers, like the little people in the movie we watched? They live under a floor in a big house, and borrow things like lump sugar and needles and bottle caps."

"Yup, those be the borrowers, but I'm talking about real borrowers, not just the ones in a movie."

Sal walked back into the wagon, and dug around under the bed. Everything had to be moved if the something you were after was behind what was in front of it. Sam's favorite phrase: 'sequential access.'

It didn't take long and Sam had already begun washing up the breakfast dishes. The water in the pot was boiling and he always liked to get the cups and silverware especially clean. 

"Come take a look," Sal had her Ma's long-handled mirror in her hand.

Sam stopped dipping the mugs. Sal pulled out one of the lawn chairs. Sam sat. Sal turned the mirror to face Sam. 

"That there is a Borrower." Sam laughed one of his prize chortles. "I'm a Borrower?" Sal nodded and pointed to herself and the one in the mirror. 

Seems Mary Norton was not just 'a genuis' (Mademoiselle magazine seemed to think so) but was writing about the sort of life Sam and Sal, or the Bamboo People as they are called today, would adapt and apply before and after the Virus of 2020 came to sit down among human beings.

With a little or a lot of imagination, I'm wondering onto this virtual page, how useful or just how darn much fun it could be to create a tiny people book that could become as wonderful (or as close to it as possible) as Mary Norton's books about borrowers. This book I'm imagining is sprouting itself just in time for the Summer Solstice, 2021. (That's tomorrow). 

"Why now? and what for?" you behind the mirror are asking I hear you, don't pretend you're not asking. It's alright that you ask. I didn't know this was going to happen until I sat, and out out continued this ripening story. That's what can happen when a writer starts having an itch brought on by a story that wants telling. 

Something about bending bamboo, people who don't have houses, and the judgment that takes place when people like that (who don't have houses) are called ... well, take the word "weed" versus "flower". According to the little story that dangled on one of my tea bags "The difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment." - Unknown  Wouldn't you know it; must have been a flower done the judging.

There are versions and adaptations of Mary Norton's original stories of the tiny people called Borrowers in television mini-series and movies. I've included a link to the 1992 PBS Mini-series "The Borrowers." What I have in mind to create is something quite different than the movie or the television versions of Norton's creation. Instead, it is the life of "Sam" and "Sally" who influence something that criss-crosses or maybe tats (as in tatting) like spiderwebs a network of stories and leanings that might be useful when a different kind of judgment day compels human beings to re-acquaint themselves with the real and gloriously diverse ways to be-ing.

"It's so awful and sad,' she once admitted to Tom Goodenough, "to belong to a race that no sane person believes in."Arrietty said in the book The Borrowers Afield, by Mary Norton

While the tale bubbles, and if you're not familiar with The Borrowers, you could explore:

FYI:

"The Borrowers (1992 TV Series)

The Borrowers, by Mary Norton

"There be a borrower"