Tikki Tikki Tembo

Yesterday I was sorting through the mail piled up on our dining room table. (Question: Am I the only one who fights a ridiculous losing battle with The Pile Of Crap On The Table? I swear, every 2 hours I’m cleaning stuff off of it.) In the pile, there was a catalog for children’s books, and on the cover was a little girl holding a few books. The titles were only just barely visible, but one of them caught my eye. It said ‘Tikki Tikki Tembo‘.

Suddenly something in my brain *dinged* (What? Your brain doesn’t do that?) and *whooshed* back 20+ years and recalled the rest of that phrase: Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo. WOW. The fact that I could remember that after seriously 20 years of it hiding deep in the recesses of my mind was a little weird. And Dan thought so too because when I said it out loud, he looked at me like I had three heads.

I couldn’t remember much about the story until I read the Wiki (does EVERYTHING have a Wiki these days? Geez.) but then slowly it came back to me. A little boy had a really long name, his little brother had a short, insignificant name, and Tikki Tikki (oh please don’t make me type all the rest of that name!) falls down a well. Because his name is so long, when his little brother tries to tell the grown ups in the story about his brother’s fall, it takes them a while to rescue him. Finally they do, and he’s okay (after 12 full moons!) but from then on, all the parents decide to keep their kids’ names short and simple. Ya know, just in case.

Not a super-fantastic, epic story (and a little scary for a little kid if you think about it. I mean, my parents could have accidentally given me a crazy-long name and I could have almost died because of it? YIKES.) but because of the silly, rhythmic name, I remembered it for over twenty years. Makes me think about what Maggie might remember in a big *WHOOSH* all of a sudden 20 years from now. We’d better watch what we say and do!

The other side of this story is the sadness when I realized that inside the catalog under the information for the book Tikki Tikki Tembo, they called it a ‘Classic from 30 years ago!’ Which translates to: JEN, YOU ARE OLD. THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AROUND ABOUT AS LONG AS YOU HAVE, AND NOW IT’S CONSIDERED A CLASSIC!

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