Mother Goose, who? Guest blog by Blair Roddan

I talk with my brother Brooks once every other week. We naturally cover what is happening in each of our everyday lives. However, the unexpected can often crop up in our conversations, sparked by who knows what, and suddenly we're led down memory lane, that place where thoughts pop into mind that you haven't thought for years, if ever..

For some reason in our last conversation I mentioned the Mother Goose nursery rhymes that I grew up with and learned by heart. Brooks and I talked about Mother Goose for awhile and then, after we'd hung up, I thought to myself, 'who was this lady, this Mother Goose?'

Her history is somewhat sketchy. Some reports say she's from Great Britain, others from Boston, Massachusetts. Her real name was either Elizabeth or Mary. She was married to a man named Isaac Goose. When husband Isaac passed away she went to live with her daughter and her family. Let it be said now that her son-in-law was a publisher. Mrs. Goose had grandchildren and would entertain them with her rhyming poetry. I can only guess that her poems were given the name "nursery rhymes" because they were composed to be read to small children. Most of them are brief, no more than six stanzas, comprehensible little ditties that a child could remember and repeat.

What's really astonishing about Mother Goose's poetry is how morbid it is. "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. On the way down Jack broke his crown." Then there's "Rockaby Baby," with its cradle hanging on the bough of a tree: when the bough broke, the baby and cradle fall to the ground. And we mustn't forget "Ring Around the Rosy": the subject matter here is a rosy rash that children of the time suffered from. Sneezing and coughing were the final fatal symptom, when "all fall down," presumably to die.

I've come to find out that Mother Goose's book of rhymes is still in print and available in your local bookstore. If my memory is correct, my wife and I had a copy of it in our child's library. Did I really raise my son on Mother Goose? Well, I suppose I did, having been raised on these dark little poems myself and living to tell about it. Reading Mother Goose to your kid seems to be a time-honored tradition.

In retrospect, I am not against tradition in the least, though we adults might want to think twice about what we're exposing our children to when we read them Mother Goose--sickness, disease, death and all the other sweet little diversions of mortal life.

Finally, re-reading Mother Goose nursery rhymes convinced me that all poetry should rhyme. I don't really understand poetry unless it rhymes.

Blair Roddan lives in Las Vegas, NV. It's said by those who know him that Blair has the most complete, inexhaustible memory of anyone in the world; he's able to remember, for instance, the name of his 1st grade teacher and the car she drove. Blair would welcome comments from anyone reading his guest blog on Mother Goose.