Writing

Rise of The Worm Wand: A Cautionary Tale

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 10 Comments

This post is a different flavor from my usual writing.  I wrote it as a submission for a wonderful blog called Monkey Goggles.  The site is excellent and besides that, it’s just pure fun.  One of my favorite posts on MG was the first one I ever read, and apparently it hits on all cylinders with a lot of people.  It is titled Mick Jagger’s Adventures is Toyland and is the 2nd most popular post of all time on Monkey Goggles.

Alas, my beloved MG went dormant at the end of 2010 and I never had the chance to submit my story.  I offer it to you here for your entertainment.  Consider it a humorous and slightly deranged take on Essays on Childhood.  Enjoy!

Rise of The Worm Wand: A Cautionary Tale

My sister and I are not quite three years apart, and we frequently are confused for one another by people who don’t know us well.  They say we look alike, but when pressed they can’t defend that.  She has blue eyes, I don’t; I’m a couple of inches taller; she dresses well, I don’t; she has never bitten her nails and I chew mine like gum.  Even now that I have brown hair and she has blonde people say, “You are so much alike!”  What they perceive, I suspect, is that we are both hard-wired products of 1970s children’s television.

Allow me to elaborate.

We grew up with Sesame Street and Shazam, Isis and The Land of the Lost.  (Don’t even get me started on Lidsville.)  We believed things, strange things, things that shaped the women we grew up to be.  We believed deep down that we were one bad accident away from becoming bionic – ripping phone books in half to get respect from a classroom of rowdy high school students, or leaping flat-footed to the roof of a building downtown.  A natural consequence of this belief is that we got a little cocky where perhaps it was not warranted; I think that still shows through sometimes and contributes to our perceived similarities.  That and a penchant for speaking in Muppet voices and waving our arms around like Kermit the Frog.

Both my sister and I developed chants and rituals directly tied to our widely underappreciated magical powers.  The adult take on a lot of it now would track to early obsessive compulsive disorder, but I really don’t think it was that.  I’m pretty sure it was primarily magic-related.  I mean, come on, if Isis could spin a certain number of times and hold her hands just right and say the right words, she could fly.  It made perfect sense to make sure I did things an even numbers of times — with the most magical power derived from factors of 8 — and conducted with my right hand or foot.  It was all about generating protective powers against breaking my mother’s back.  All good kids were doing that, right?

I know.  Don’t tell me.  I don’t really want my peculiarity confirmed.  It’s too late.

My sister took her fashion cues from Charlie’s Angels, and as an elementary student could rock a silk scarf better than Kate Jackson.   She also worshipped Mary Hart from Entertainment Tonight and envisioned taking over Mary’s empire one day.   I can’t explain why I never picked up on the comprehensive effort at good appearance that my sister did, but I want to blame it on a Barbie manikin head a friend of mine had.  I developed a conviction that if you just did your hair and makeup as if your body didn’t exist it was all good.  I’m finding out that’s not really so, but I’m too set in my ways to change much now.

Our early friendships had that Scooby Doo composition of mixed genders, smart kids, goof balls, pretty ones and jocks.  Though no one actually dubbed their vehicle The Mystery Machine, I distinctly remember one we called Super Pickle.  My sister’s friends were prone to poking around in places where they could be perceived as “those meddling kids.”  The Scooby Doo gang was just a highly evolved Breakfast Club, well ahead of its time.  Mr. Potato Head had a strange late-breaking impact in our teen years, when I kicked my sister out of my room so I could read in peace and she retaliated by lobbing an Idaho baker stuck with a lighted sparkler into my room like a grenade.  I told her well done, but she missed an opportunity for real genius when it wasn’t followed immediately by a handful of French fries as fall out.

I am fairly certain that this potato explosive event was the intersection of the magical thinking of very young children with the warped power-games of adolescence that gave rise to The Worm Wand.

I want to tell you that I remember exactly how this oddment came into being, but I don’t.  All it was, physically, was the remnants of a checkbook register.  Every check and deposit slip was torn out, and all that remained was a rectangle of cardboard edged with a thicker binding where all of the paper once was attached.  Something about the binding of the register edge made it pliable yet stable.  I made it into a hook-like finger and strangely, it acquired a power.

What could it do?  The one thing I needed it to do.  It could control my sister.

Obviously even then it was a game.  She would start to get on my nerves and I would reach into my purse and pull out The Worm Wand and utter, “Silence!  The Worm Wand commands you to stop pestering me!”  And she did, laughing hilariously the whole time, but she did.  It had a snowball effect.  Each time she obeyed the commands of The Worm Wand, its power seemed to grow.  “The Worm Wand commands you to change the channel.  The Worm Wand commands you to give your sister the last bag of chips.  The Worm Wands overrides your shot-gun call.”  I could get anything I wanted just by having the wand make an appearance and make it so.

In hindsight, only someone drunk with power would not have seen the inevitable coup that was brewing.  But drunk I was, and I got lazy.  One day my sister and I were sitting on the couch and she casually asked, “Hey, where’s The Worm Wand?”  Like a fool, I replied, “I think it’s upstairs in my room.”

I never dreamed she could move that fast.

She was up and off the couch as if she could fly.   My split-second hesitation was my undoing.  She was up the stairs three at a time and I tripped trying to keep up with her.  She disappeared for a moment, and as I flopped onto the landing I looked up to see my triumphant former servant wielding The Worm Wand over my head and screaming, “Ah ha!  Now you will pay!”

We both were laughing so hard we could not breathe.  I honestly thought I might expire on that landing from my convulsions and inability to respirate.

My sister and I have debriefed over The Worm Wand and its bizarre dynamic for decades now.  The whole thing achieved the status of one of the weirdest and funniest episodes from our childhood, and that is no small feat.  We did some very crazy stuff.

The Worm Wand was entertaining, but it also scared us, and in later years I found out why.  Most people have an innate tendency to submit  to authority.  That trait is no doubt there to keep us safe in most instances.  What The Worm Wand episode taught me was how arbitrary and nonsensical it can be, and how dangerous.  It was just a game, and it was very funny, but the scary part was to actually feel a random object gaining some influence over another person, and to feel that influence gaining a personality and life of its own.  Most of us don’t believe we are this vulnerable.  The value of The Worm Wand episode for me was the purity of the psychological experiment.  We didn’t set out to do anything, or to prove or debunk any theories.  We were just kids in our own little Lord of the Flies; yet we were old enough to feel unhinged by the experience.

I still think about ole TWW.  What triggers it can be as heavy as a news reference to the Nazi movement or as light was someone asking me to get in line.  The words “you can’t” or “you have to” never fall lightly on these ears.  Sometimes when the light is just right and I squint my eyes, the speaker gains the form of a hooked finger.

Or a checkbook register.  It’s hard to say.

Image credits: Google (various uncredited sources) and Linkbuilderz.com

Ashes to Ashes, Pen to Paper: Embracing Grief for the Good of Your Writing

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 15 Comments

“You can’t go on feeling sad without first consenting to stand in the ashes of some past event and then rubbing the memory of it all over yourself.” – Guy Finley

Mr. Finley sounds like a nice man.  His website suggests he is very successful in his chosen field of helping people “self-realize” and “find the direct path to an enlightened life.”

I’m also pretty sure Shakespeare would not have given him the time of day.  And Finley might say that is fine.

Sometimes one has to defend a tradition of excellence in one field by pointing out the potential threats of another.  This post is a brief defense of literature against today’s obsession with feeling good, being positive, and not engaging “the past.”

This is one of the first images I found for “ashes” – it’s not literal here, but so beautiful it feels right for this post.

I want to be perfectly clear that I admire the decision to break free from the unhealthy habits and ways of thinking that keep people stuck in a negative place, particularly a place from their past that is fueled by some dysfunctional relationship or event.  There is not much worse than watching someone wallow around in bad Karma and toxic beliefs when you know they could find their way out with the guidance of someone like Mr. Finley.   But, but, but………..

………What jumped out at me when I read his quote on a friend’s Facebook wall was how beautiful the image is and how powerful from an artistic perspective — “Consenting to stand in the ashes of some past event and then rubbing the memory of it all over yourself.”

I write mostly reflective personal essays.  I’ve dabbled in humor and even a ghost story, but my launching place and motivation for writing is rooted in a desire to understand my personal narrative.  I think many people write for this reason, and even when the short story or novel or essay is not literally about the writer, some very good material is drawn from personal experience.  I’m a bit sad that we seem to be defining immersion in struggle and vulnerability to grief as a character flaw.

Consider The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.  Recounting the year after her husband’s death by cardiac arrest, the author is a portrait of standing in the ashes, covering herself in them in an attempt to understand the loss of her best friend and life partner:

Joan Didion and her husband, Gregory Dunne

The narrative structure of the book follows Didion’s re-living and re-analysis of her husband’s death throughout the year following it, in addition to caring for Quintana (her ill daughter). With each replay of the event, the focus on certain emotional and physical aspects of the experience shifts. Didion also incorporates medical and psychological research on grief and illness into the book.

I carry in my head some lines about grief from Didion’s book.  Grief comes in waves.  Sometimes the waves slow in their crashing on your shore, but they do return and can be as powerful years later as they were upon the mournful event that precipitated them.

Grief is a force, there is no getting around that.  Grief is present in physical death, but also in the deaths of relationships, of opportunities, of a whole host of “ends” that it seems we often want to deny.

The truth is, and I won’t make a penny by telling you this, sometimes things are over, done and gone.

To embrace that they are over may mean standing in the ashes.  Sometimes the standing is not enough — you have to really get down and dirty and cover yourself with the evidence of the end.  I’m not sure it means you want to be sad forever, or that you are at some kind of fault for needing to grieve and to feel.  I think Finley implies a weakness in covering oneself with grief.  He might grow a bit on his self-realized path if he had tea with Joan Didion, and let her do some realizing with him.  There is no absence of strength in this woman.

My posts are slowed this month as I work with other writers who are developing Essays on Childhood.  I am drawn to headlines and references that speak to the personal narrative, and to the process of standing in the ashes.  Just this past weekend in my local paper there was a profile of Jane Congdon whose book, It Started With Dracula: The Count, My Mother and Me explores the author’s decades-long fascination with vampires.

Only on a trip to Romania, where the landscape of rivers and mountains triggered her childhood memories in Glen Ferris, West Virginia, did she make a life-changing connection to her mother’s alcoholism.

“All I wanted to do was see the land of Dracula and write about it, like a travel essay. I wasn’t going to write about my mother. I had opened my mind, and when I did, all those memories came back.

“I made the connection that some people are monsters. I couldn’t have told you why I liked Dracula, but the resemblance started to come to me — the mother with an unending thirst and a vampire with an unending thirst, and mountains and rivers. It just started to jell. It’s interesting how it started out to be a simple travel issue and turned out to be a parallel of my life with something I never connected to it. I loved Dracula, and all this was going on with Mom.”

You can write as an observer without being willing to embrace the human experience.  I think you can write excellent technical manuals, website content, textbooks or even some pieces of journalism.  But literature requires a process with levels of vulnerability and complexity that is different and often scorned, and we should support those who are willing to engage that process if we don’t want to lose an entire generation of readers and writers to self-help books.

The phoenix is a sacred creature in multiple cultures, but not yet in North America.  Maybe one day, it will be sacred here.

I hope it’s holding a pen.

Phoenix depicted in the book of mythological creatures by F.J. Bertuch (1747-1822).

Most beings spring from other individuals; but there is a certain kind which reproduces itself. The Assyrians call it the Phoenix. It does not live on fruit or flowers, but on frankincense and odoriferous gums. When it has lived five hundred years, it builds itself a nest in the branches of an oak, or on the top of a palm tree. In this it collects cinnamon, and spikenard, and myrrh, and of these materials builds a pile on which it deposits itself, and dying, breathes out its last breath amidst odors. From the body of the parent bird, a young Phoenix issues forth, destined to live as long a life as its predecessor. When this has grown up and gained sufficient strength, it lifts its nest from the tree (its own cradle and its parent’s sepulchre), and carries it to the city of Heliopolis in Egypt, and deposits it in the temple of the Sun (from the Roman poet Ovid).

Image credit:  Ashes and Snow (elephant), Denis Piel (Didion and Dunne), F.J. Bertuch (Phoenix)