“Orphans make the best recruits.” M to 007, in Skyfall
Although commonly disparaged in self-help books, Pollyanna is a nice novel. I enjoyed it as a classic about an impoverished orphan refusing to be defeated.
Surely Amy Adams would have played the heroine if any Pollyanna movies been made during Amy’s girlhood: “I think that I’ve always been attracted to characters who are positive and come from a very innocent place. I think there’s a lot of room for discovery in these characters and that’s something I always have fun playing.”
I guess the Japanese like orphans. As tourists in Canada they go to see where Ann of Green Gables lived. Here (link) is the lyrical opening to a Japanese 13-episode anime series, Someday’s Dreamers, about a 16 year old girl who goes all alone to the big city—or is she only 15? (Translators may forget the Japanese number their ages by starting with gestation)—to learn to be a mage. I liked the show so much I learned to sing the gentle song: It fits my voice range. The man in the orange shirt with the big smile is explicitly a former orphan. Perhaps he smiles all the time because life will always be better now.
In the Hollywood TV series Angel, as Fred is lying deathly sick, the boyfriend reads aloud from The Story of Sarah Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s about an orphan.
The eponymous star of Angel, actor David Boreanaz, is also the co-star in the TV series Bones with his eponymous co-star being “Bones,” the lady doctor. She is a nerd, terribly unskilled socially, partly because she went through the foster system. In the episode “A Knight on the Grid,” as a girl lies sick in hospital, Bones reads aloud about a strong orphan girl in The Secret Garden: …“Why was I forgotten?” Mary said, stamping her foot, “Why does nobody come?”…
Although Bones, with her harsh past, is maternal instinct challenged, she ends up becoming licensed by the state as a foster mom, for the sake of a family she knows, for “just in case.” And she does whatever it takes to develop a maternal instinct. I am confident that a nerd like Bones, with a harsh past, can develop a maternal instinct: I have done so.
In real life, a person may go years without revealing to you they were in a special home. And that’s OK. I guess in a big home the odds are good that one or more of the staff will be good. Of course the staff don’t get too tired and cranky: They only work eight hour shifts.
I hope I would be like the volunteer in my War of the Worlds poem:
…
A Champion
Curtis Wright
before the Martians came
was well known as a racing car champion.
He made everyone roar in the stands.
Less well known
was his friendship with everyone
in an orphanage at the edge
of a broad asphalt plain with flat roofed buildings.
He was showing children
his “Big Orphan Annie,”
with a body of tubes,
ethylene engine,
and broad Vulcan tires,
on the day the towering Martian Tripod approached.
“Uncle Curtis”
sped off like a mother bird with a broken wing.
Look! Here are the tire marks,
where he spun the wheel and kicked the brakes.
Here is where he did a Vulcan drift—it should have been impossible.
There! A factory with windows melted,
great gaping holes from Martian blasts.
Particles of brick flew everywhere that day.
…The orphanage still stands…
Curtis Wright
was once known as a racing champion.
He would escape the pack
and roar across the finish line.
He has not escaped from our hearts.
…
…
Sean Crawford
North of a world class Japanese garden in Lethbridge
September 2020
