ducks

Do you remember The Story about Ping, by Marjorie Flack?

I loved reading it as a child and was quite taken with the various Chinese people drawn in it, mostly because they had their head shaved with dark little pony tails here and there. As a mid-western little girl, they were something to behold.

I was thinking about Ping yesterday. Are you familiar with him? He is a fluffy yellow adorable duckling. He belongs to a big BIG family of aunts, uncles, cousins, mom, dad, brothers and sisters. Every day they are let off a boat with two wise eyes on the yellow waters of the Yangtze River (something else for a little girl to ponder).

They go about doing what ducks do… finding things to eat. Every evening, the ducks’ owner calls out to them, ‘lalalalalalalei’ and the ducks come running up to the little bridge to get on the boat. The very last duck gets a swat on the back. I’m not even sure that this swat hurt.

Ping didn’t want to be swatted, EVER, so he always made sure he was never last. Was it a pride issue? A fear issue? He had never been swatted, so how was he to know what the results would be?

But one day…. ONE day… he wasn’t paying attention. He was off doing his thing and by the time he heard the call, he knew full well he was going to be last. He was going to get spanked.

So he hid.

And he was all alone.

And he decided to find his wise boat and his family. But he got caught and had various misadventures.

Always looking for his family, he finally spots the wise boat and hears the owner call. And you can probably guess the rest. He is last… he doesn’t care anymore.

Sometimes we are off doing our own thing, avoiding what really needs to be done because we think it might hurt. We don’t even know if it really will. So we turn our backs on it, perhaps thinking that we are really doing something more important. We miss the boat. And find out it hurts even more.