Fifty Shades of Snails

Oh once I had a downy swan, she was so very frail

She sat upon an oyster shell and hatched me out a snail
The snail it changed into a bird, the bird to butterfly
And he who tells a bigger tale would have to tell a lie.
Sing tarry-o day, sing, autumn to May

Peter, Paul and Mary

Dear Mr. Green Jeans:

Why is my yard suddenly full of snails? I've found huge piles of them in the mornings, like a giant snail orgy, and they're all over the yards. I picked up over 200 just this morning and that's the littlest pile I've found yet!
We've also got tons of worm beds and little mushrooms popping up all over the yard and the field next to us. We've been in a drought for a while and have just had a lot of rain recently, and I know their eggs can stay for a long time, but these are tons of snails. They're not just one kind, it's the small white ones, the spiral brown ones, and even the big round ones and they're every size from baby to huge. They're not just in a garden and I can't put eggshells or copper all over my yards. These things are making slimy trails everywhere and are hanging all over the outside of my house.

- Slimed

SNAILS SNAILS SNAILS. I can’t get them out of my head. Also that song about an English Country Garden, which is equally offensive.

I don’t know how this all connects together, although I suppose it does in the usual bass-ackwards way. I have set myself a goal for two of my grandchildren’s birthdays: since they’re fairly close together, the two will be combined into one celebration, bound to be a biggie.

Since we’re on a limited income and since they are already buried in toys they don’t particularly want, I would like to try something different. I want to make all their presents. I have become obsessed with knitting stuffed toys, and so far have had some pretty good results, along with some disasters that I gutted for their stuffing and threw away. My goal is not to buy anything for the two girls (who will be turning 5 and 7), except materials to make my knitted stuffies.

But I had to have a theme. For reasons I can’t trace back, I wanted to make a storybook (another thing I like to do for them) complete with pictures gleaned off the generous internet: a retelling of the Ugly Duckling story, in which the duckling grows up to be a beautiful. . . duck. But I decided that pictures weren’t enough: I was going to attempt to illustrate the story with stuffies. (I'm getting to the snails, I promise.)

Making the ducklings was fairly easy, using an Easter chick pattern and adapting it: Stubby, the ugly one; Wakwak, the most obnoxious of the “normal” yellow ducklings; and Tuffy, the baby swan. I did make a mature swan, but a pink one (cuzzadafact that Lauren specifically asked for one). Like many patterns I find, it had to be completely revised to make it more swanny. (How I love ya, how I love ya. Sorry.)

I expanded the story a bit to include a Frog King and Frog Queen, one of my more challenging patterns. (Accessories are key. The Queen is wearing a pink bead anklet.) This project is coming along well, though it’s no secret I’m obsessed, and also constantly running out to buy materials (I NEVER have the right color/quantity of yarn for what I want to do). But there’s no snail in this story, and Erica loves snails, collects them, puts them in jars, watches them, feeds them leaves, etc. She is a girl who loves creepy-crawlies.

My knitted snail pattern was, oh. It was dreadful. It looked so good, and the pattern-book said even a beginner could do it. I have been knitting for fifty years, and I am here to tell you that NO beginner could even begin this, let alone finish it. The shell went OK, but the instructions for the body were impossible to interpret. (This was from a book of knitted amigurumi, which I do not recommend.) So it was redesigning time. I came up with a sort of beanbag slug for a body, then attached the shell, hoping it would do.

You couldn’t possibly reproduce a real snail, disgusting and slimy with its indecent eye-stalks probing ickily forwards, in any sort of textile form.  But I did the best I could. So what does any of this have to do with Donovan, or the videos I posted today?

I don’t know why his songs came into my head today. I adored him as a kid: I got stoned to Donovan for the first time in my life, and I remember hearing Wear Your Love Like Heaven feeling as if I was three feet off the ground. (Never mind that it was also used in a Yardley’s Sigh Shadow makeup ad.)

Looking back, he was a phenomenal artist: Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow (CONFESS: did this song inspire you to smoke banana peels?), Atlantis, Jennifer Juniper, and tons of others. His double album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden (a sappy title only the ‘60s could get away with) was chock-a-block with charming, imaginative, tender anthems to those free-and-easy times: record #1 had his more “hip”songs with arrangements and backup musicians, and the other one his wistful, guitar-only folk tunes, all self-composed.  Song of the Naturalist’s Wife began with the sound of a newborn baby crying, tugging at the viscera of every female who ever listened.

Right. Listening to these for the first time in (blllblblbltt) years gave me the strangest feeling. Some of them seemed a bit sappy, but others got me right in that twingy little place behind the breast-bone.  I had to pick one: and into my head popped his silliest, flutiest, cutest, hippest number. And there it was: Lock upon my garden gate’s a snail, that’s what it is! So it was one of those weird things.

Donovan was barely 20 years old when he became “Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan” (which, in spite of a superficial physical resemblance, he wasn’t:  his lyrics were wispy and fey, lacking all that rage and snap and snarl). He had polio as a child (who knew?), so he walked with a limp. His son, also named Donovan, once popped up on Sex and the City. I don’t feel like finding out any more because this is already meandering on far too long.

(And nutmeg. Yes, I smoked nutmeg and it was awful and later on I found out it could cause brain damage.) Snails can be cute, but for the most part they’re kind of awful. Unlike slugs, they have the decency to withdraw into shells that can be quite pretty. But the slime trails they leave can’t be defended. Peter, Paul and Mary did one of those icky-sixties songs, whimsical, that incorporated a snail. Then there is the Dear Abby of snailhood that I found about a horrible snail invasion in somebody’s yard.

Quick! Ick! Get the snail bait!

And a not-very-fond farewell to the topic of snails. Two poems I remember so well from WTF ("where the fxxx?"), the precious-sounding original, then the parody.

My Garden by T. E. Brown

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Fern'd grot --

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not --

Not God! in Gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

'Tis very sure God walks in mine.

My Garden by J. A. Lindon

A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot!
Weed plot,
Scum pool,
Old pot,
Snail-shiny stool
In pieces; yet the fool
Contends that snails are not -
Not snails!  in gardens!  when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I see their trails!
’Tis very sure my garden’s full of snails!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html


http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Hey, if you're not cool enough to know what Mad Men is, why are you reading this?

Let us now praise famous men. Famous men like Jon Hamm. I don't care if he has a silly name. Where has he been all my life?

Jon Hamm is one of those actors who was sleeping in a pupa for 10 years before finding the role that not only defines him, but a whole era. The show's executive producer Matt Weiner has been quoted as saying, "Mad Men IS Jon Hamm."

Watching the show is like the Time Tunnel or something. I step across the thresshold into the wonderful land of Ahhhhhhhs. Period details don't just leap out at me, they jab me: the "Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy" TV campaign jingle I hadn't heard since I was five; the "High Flight" TV signoff while Pete Campbell was screwing an anonymous sweet patootie (with her elderly mother on the other side of a folding door); Don Draper's little kids running around with dry cleaning bags over their heads.

I could go into all the machinations and intrigues of the advertising agency Sterling Cooper, but let's not, shall we? Recently they canned art director Sal Romano, my next-to-Don favorite, maybe for being gay or too nice or something. Meantime, Don trudges on. At the end of the third season, his company has disintegrated, his wife has run off with some ugly-looking Senator whom she doesn't love, and he has run out of Lucky Strikes for the third time today.

There is a weirdness about Mad Men (i. e. Robert Morse as the eccentric company Zen master, Bertram Cooper: where have we seen him before? He starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the early '60s, perfect period timing, not to mention Mad Men irony), a sense that, in spite of all the deja vu, we've never quite covered this territory before. A man can get his foot run over by a John Deere tractor during a drunken office party (causing the cynical Roger Sterling to quip, "It's like Iwo Jima out there"). A thick-headed husband can get brained with a vase. But most of all. . . most of all, we can spend some quality time with Don.

Don has many faces, the hardened masked face of the office, the creased-brow expression during the numerous boyhood flashbacks (the only part of the show I really detest), the softer face when he is with his kids (and in spite of being emotionally crippled, he really does love his kids), the roughed-up, carnivorous, rrrrrrrrArrrrrrw! face when he's in bed with some woman (a different woman every week). Yes, in bed he's a whole 'nother guy. Every once in a while, he even screws his wife. God, what a body, and he has that good man-smell that somehow mysteriously comes across on the screen. (Men either smell good - George Clooney, Harrison Ford - or they don't - Matthew McConnaghey, Brad Pitt). Just enough hair, and a build that is devastating but somehow doesn't call attention to itself.

So what would it be like to have sex with Don Draper? Has he read the Kinsey Report? (I don't mean that loser guy in the office.) Does he know what a clitoris is? Does he, "you know"? Do "everything", as Elaine used to say on Seinfeld? They can't show too much, of course. But it's implied. "I might scream," one of his conquests, a naive young school teacher, gasps. "Don't," Don replies. Another time, well, he ties someone up, but she deserves it because she's such a slut.

And what is Jon Hamm reallyreally like? The photos I see show a goofier person, his smile a little too broad. A person who can't quite believe his good fortune at being famous, at having a really juicy and challenging part at last (and according to legend, he spent a whole decade as a waiter). I think he's probably pretty hyper. But seems to have one steady girlfriend, un-Draperlike. He gave a long interview for the Advocate, and for a moment I was heartbroken, afraid it was maybe Sal he loved all along. But then they mentioned the girl friend, and everything was all right again.

Maybe. (But who is she?? I'll scratch her eyes out!)

The thing about Jon Hamm is that he is a somewhat more rugged version of Anthony Perkins in his youth. Perkins had a sort of supernatural beauty before age and AIDS withered him up into an old walnut. Hamm naturally has a sort of GQ look, that "I was born to wear a tux" aura that is so rare in men. Cary Grant had it, but I've never felt any sort of attraction to him (in spite of the fact that he was probably also a good-smelling man, if gay).

So how does JH smell? A hint of warm sandalwood; some aftershave remeniscent of Old Spice; a neutral deodorant we can't name; a soupcon of bourbon, but maybe from yesterday; Lucky Strikes, not the smoke but the unburned shreds of tobacco with its golden, molasses-y scent; fine quality wool; leather jacket worn earlier today; clean shirt, with the man-smell just barely sifting through.

Sheer torture.