One of the privileges of parenthood is playing with your wee ones' piggies.
Before having a son with a complete set of ten little piggies, I hadn't given the whole piggy situation much thought. Sure, my own mom didn't allow me to check out of childhood without a solid grounding in piggy lore. She was the Mistress of Making Everything OK and, as I remember, piggies were a handy tool for distracting grumpy little people and making them forget what was so terrible, horrible, painful, or unjust.
The customary verse, for the heathens in the audience, goes something like this, starting with the big toe:
This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
This little piggy had none.
And this little piggy went wee! wee! wee! all the way home.
Now that I have a son, I usually do my own piggy thing, spinning baroque biographies for each piggy. For example, this little piggy is built like an offensive lineman and, in fact, he was scouted in college, but he decided to follow his heart and now runs a nursery on the central coast that specializes in bonsai. This little piggy volunteers at a hemp growing collective and he believes that pot should be available to the terminally ill. This little piggy sews cheap rain ponchos in a sweatshop in Guatemala. This little piggy is a designer working for Yves Saint Laurent. And this little piggy dropped out of school and went wee! wee! wee! all the way home.
I find that piggy improvisation is good for the brain and it keeps the wee ones interested, but I've also started pondering the whole scope of the traditional piggy milieu.
"This little piggy went to market." As a naïve suburban child, I always imagined an anthropomorphized, Richard-Scarry-style housewife piggy, hair done up under a scarf tied under the chin, basket in arm, off to do the day's shopping at the market. Now I can see that the biggest, fattest piggy is most probably being sent off to market to be converted into bacon, ham, SPAM, and head cheese.
"This little piggy stayed home." At first gloss, this is one lucky piggy. Maybe he's a pet. Maybe he's a champion piggy, prized for his boarish attributes and put out to stud. But if he's not so lucky, it could be that this little piggy is suffering from tuberculosis and, instead of being sent off to market, is waiting at home for the knacker.
"This little piggy had roast beef" Granted, actual piggies are omnivorous, but this just sounds wrong. Some steer, after having gone to market itself, gave up the ghost so that a piggy could have roast beef. And who is serving roast beef to a piggy anyway? This is indisputably a very fortunate piggy.
"This little piggy had none." Was he a bad little piggy? Did he build his house from straw or sticks instead of bricks? Was he vegan?
Finally, that wee-weeing piggy: where was he wee-weeing all the way home from? I would think that your typical piggy doesn't get out much. Most everything is brought to the piggy: sows in heat, roast beef, etc. The only place that someone's going to bother to transport a piggy is to market. Therefore, it's quite likely that this little piggy somehow escaped confinement before slaughter and is now running home terrified. However, it's highly unlikely that the piggy knows the way. I'm not aware of any homing piggies. Besides, home is not the best place for the piggy to by wee-weeing to in the first place. The folks at home are likely to step up piggy security during transport or even do in the piggy themselves. What's probably going to happen is that the piggy is going to wee and run right into the "weird news" section of a newspaper, become internationally famous as a porcine escape artist, be adopted by some admiring piggy lover, and spend the rest of its days eating roast beef and humping a stump.
Pakeha