When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

1 Corinthians 13: 11

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys

One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar

From the Lyrics to Puff the Magic Dragon, by Peter, Paul & Mary

Bullies

Vladimir Putin is Russia’s most recent bully. Since Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine on March 24, more than 10 million Ukrainians have fled their homes, villages and cities. That’s 1 out of 4 Ukrainians. If this was America, 80 million people would be on the road. That’s California, Texas and Florida emptied. Numbers can numb but pictures can teach. And preach. Not only the good news.

A friend told me of a friend who lost faith in God because of Putin’s war on Ukraine. I remember another time, another Russian bully, and another kind of loss. It was the fall of 1960. I am 11 and have just finished delivering the afternoon Quad City Times to my 44 customers.

A kid’s story about a bully

Mom told me to go outside and said she would call me when supper was ready. I’m not hungry because I stopped at a bakery to eat two donuts. In school today we had a fun drill. We do this once a month. Sometimes we get in a line and march outside the school and stand around. That’s my favorite. Today, we got under our desks. Our teacher said we needed to practice in case the Russians dropped a big bomb.

I went outside and started kicking a football up on our garage roof to see how many times I could catch it before it hit the ground. I knew the sound was coming, it always did around 5. When the screaming started, I looked toward where I knew the pole with the yellow horn was. I just stood there looking out over the roof of our neighbor’s house, with my arms around my football. Mom knocked on the family room window and I went in to supper.

That night I dreamed a bald, fat man with glasses crashed through our classroom door while me and my classmates were under our desks. I did not like this dream or this man.

Loss of innocence

I don’t know if paperboy Paul ever saw this picture of the Soviet leader but I think he did. My parents took my brothers and me to see John Kennedy and Richard Nixon when they campaigned in the Quad Cities in the fall of 1960. I remember sitting on my dad’s shoulders in front of St. Anthony’s Church in downtown Davenport and spotting Kennedy in an open convertible. My mom and dad talked about politics and the world. I knew mom supported Kennedy and dad Nixon. We usually watched the evening news. And I always looked through one of the 22 papers while I ate donuts, at the half-way point of my route. I must have seen Khrushchev’s raised-fist podium image.

1950s school atomic bomb drills, air raid sirens, and Mr. Khrushchev’s photograph stewed away inside that 11 year old kid and produced a dream that rattled his world. When does a child begin to turn away from childish things? When does Jackie Paper come no more?

I have been puzzled by my 11 year old self on that fall afternoon. Why was I transfixed by the siren? My memory is of a hyperactive kid who was motionless, looking out toward the sound and away from the garage and his childish game. I was teetering, between childhood and adulthood.

The Khrushchev-bully dream was my Jackie Paper moment, when I put away a childish idea, of a world that was as safe as my backyard.

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Putin’s bullying of Ukraine got me to thinking about another Russian bully who was part of my childhood. Of course, my country, America, has plenty of its own bullies. The Bull in Bull Connor fit. And my country has bullied other countries and its own people. That’s a subject for another blog.