FARE WELL TO THE STORK
Meyer, Ernest L.
Farewell To The Stork By ERNEST L. MEYER Meyer AFP3W weeks ago, in the current issue of the magazine Science, there was an article which struck me as one of unusual interest. In it the two...
...But when I entered the myth business and brought babies to the humans that live beyond the marsh my troubles began...
...And all that I desire to be is a hardworking conscientious myth deserving no one's laurels, for I know my poor merits, and deserving no one's contempt, for I have my sorrows...
...The Stork's Sorrows Now, though I was the bearer of great tidings, I politely asked the stork the cause for his snuffling, and he replied: "Because people either burden me with too much anger or abash me with too much praise...
...There is one part of the myth business that I like, and that is winging through the night with a new baby under my wing...
...In the splashy shallows, the myths leaned toward each other forlornly...
...This one, says the mother, will not be as I am, nor will he be as his father and all his brothers and sisters are...
...I am not, pray believe me, loath to drop my human babies into the world beyond the marsh, but when I see them fall like thistledown on bleak and stony soil then I weary of the myth business, and my heart is heavy...
...I have just read in a learned magazine that scientists are on the verge of discovering how to create human babies in a laboratory test tube...
...The stork cocked one eye at me from under his wing and he said: "Such a miracle, truly, would relieve me of work, but not of woe...
...I make no great plans for them...
...That is all the stork said, and I left the marsh of old myths quickly, for the sun was going down, and I must hasten home to read more about babies who are born and babies who are buried in faraway, strange places of the world where the evening lullaby is a murmuring of guns...
...Here is a baby, so new, so fresh, so willing, and so avid to pluck happiness with his blind little fingers...
...it will remain human, and bruise its spirits against the flints and the wars and the woes of the world, and it will mingle its curses with the mother's tears...
...That I do not," said the stork angrily...
...And then, to cheer him, I broke the great news...
...And these are the curses and tears that blow down to the marsh of old myths, and this is my sorrow...
...Then," I said, "you believe in birth control, which is wicked...
...What this means, to the average layman, is simply that here we have the forecast, a very shadowy forecast, to be sure, of the possibility of begetting human life in a laboratory test tube, a laboratory incubator, and with the aid of a yet undiscovered synthetic placenta...
...No, he will be happy, content...
...I do not dream that this one baby of mine shall become an eagle, and that the second shall become a humming bird, for I know it is written that they remain storks, with a stork's capacity for fugitive joys and sorrows...
...I believe in adult control, which is wise...
...This possibility, fantastic as it well may be, gave me joy, for I knew it would comfort an unhappy and good friend of mine, the stork, and straightway I sped to the marsh of old myths where he lived...
...I am old, and a bit sentimental, and I confess I share in a measure the mother's dream...
...My own give me no tribulations, for they grow up in a way that is precise, and they lead exact lives which, after their fashion, are good lives...
...he will live an ordered life, full of peace, and he will do great things and merit the praise of mankind for his good works...
...That will relieve you of all the burdens of this stork-myth business...
...The things that happen to him are the work of adults so witless and fearsome that they will not refashion the world so that my bundles will find in it a harborage more safe...
...Of all the inhabitants of the marsh of old myths the stork was the saddest...
...Babies," said the stork...
...The marsh was a melancholy place, full of withered things...
...For I know too profoundly what the world needs...
...In each case, when I lay my bundle on the mother's bed and she looks into the eyes new-opened, I bring not only a baby but a dream, which is not of my choosing...
...First I am denounced as a servant of the devil, and then 1 am praised as a messenger from God...
...The sorry things that happen to him are not of his choosing, nor the fruit of his guilt, for he has no guilt, however much theologians will dispute the point...
...What The World Needs "Be of brave heart," I cried...
...What the world needs is not to bear more life, but to make life more bearable...
...What are your sorrows 1" I asked...
...In it the two authors, John Rock of Harvard University, and Miriam F. Menkin of the Brookline, Mass., Free Hospital for Women, described how they fertilized human ova in a test tube with human spermatozoa and succeeded for the first time on record in causing cleavage of the one-cell original ovum into three cells...
...I am either on one foot or the other, and the constant shifting is irritating, even for a myth...
...That is what the stork said, and he slid his head under his wing sadly...
...But the thing that I bring, alas, will rarely be fashioned into either an eagle or a humming bird...
...Other people's babies...
...With Heavy Heart "That is what the mother thinks, gazing at the bundle that I bring...
...Probably, sometime, in cheap wholesale lots...
...there were centaurs and brownies and hippogriffs, and leprechauns with wet noses, weary of mystifying men...
...But more sorrowful than the rest was the stork, who stands forever on one leg because the other is forever busy with his handkerchief...
...I love babies, but I loathe the dreadful things that adults visit upon their fledglings...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 34
