ash would like to observe: Remember how relatively minor stories with no universal implications dominated news and talking head programs before the grave, deadly serious event of 2001? Oh. That’s right. It was but a temporary interruption.
When I was a child, one of my records - the obsolete, vinyl kind - was a song about two brothers. It was by Shari Lewis, I think, though I wouldn’t swear to it now.
One of the brothers had a very long name. It was the longest name I’ve ever heard. The name was so long it comprised the entire chorus of the song. It went like this: Tiki tiki timbo, something kimbo, hoi koi, something poi, Myrna Loy, (no, not really, though that would have amused the parents who bought these records for their baby boomer kids), something, something, and two more lines of nonsense sounds that make children laugh with delight. The other brother’s name was one, blunt syllable, like Po, or Wo, or Choi. (They were Chinese brothers, I guess.) So Shari or whoever sang several narrative verses alternating with the chorus - the first brother’s name -explaining that it was a custom in the family or community to give children longer names the more they were loved, and relating how the brother with the long name was the parents’ darling son, though whether it was because he was handsome, good, polite, or smart now escapes me. And while she didn’t elaborate, it was clear the other son was, to paraphrase, more of an afterthought. And she sang of how the parents and extended family celebrated the favorite son by showering him with all the attention while pretty much ignoring the son with the short name for reasons I have long since forgotten.
Then came the climax, the dramatic event. When the son with the chorus-long name slipped or was fooling around and somehow managed to fall into the bottom of some deep, dark well (it was either a long time ago or in some primitive, rural setting), the son with the monosyllabic name went running for help. Locating his father or mother or some other adult, Po, or Wo, or Choi tried to blurt out what had happened. But first he had to sing through his brother’s name: Tiki tiki timbo, something, something, hoi koi, Eddie Foy, and by the time he got to the end of that chorus: fell…in…to…the…welllllll - you guessed it - his brother had drowned.
End of song. Or maybe not. There may have been a coda but I don’t think so, and there didn’t need to be one. The parable was hardly subtle. Subtlety eludes most children. The irony, if I would have described it in more childish terms, was obvious, and the consensus of the other children I played the song for was that the resolution was satisfying. The beloved child perished; the overlooked child survived. It wasn’t that the beloved child deserved to die or that it wasn’t a sad ending. (As far as I remember, Shari didn’t analyze the meaning or even imply there was one and she certainly didn’t say whether the surviving child later sought counseling to cope with his guilt.) It was just that the surviving child seemed to have been rewarded for being a loyal brother and now, maybe, it was his turn to live.
This song, in the many years since the last time I played it on an old-fashioned record player, had been pushed into the deep, dark recesses of my brain. There were forty years worth of bits and pieces of subsequent information clogging it like so much debris when something pulled the memory of this song to the forefront, and I know what it was. The Ramsey case. The Ramsey family. The children’s names: JonBenet Patricia Ramsey and Burke. It proves nothing but reveals so much.
Hoi koi, indeed.