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!

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Fifty Shades of God Consciousness

 Rosy-Kins

a poem by

Robert Service

As home from church we two did plod,

“Grandpa,” said Rosy, “What is God?”

Seeking an answer to her mind,

This is the best that I could find. . . .

God is the Iz-ness of our Cosmic Biz;
The high, the low, the near, the far,
The atom and the evening star;
The lark, the shark, the cloud, the clod,
The whole darned Universe—that’s God.

   Some deem that others there be,
And to them humbly bend the knee;

To Mumbo Jumbo and to Joss,

To Bud and Allah—but the Boss

Is mine . . . While there are suns and seas

MY timeless God shall dwell in these.

In every glowing leaf He lives;
When roses die His life he gives;

God is not outside and apart
From Nature, but her very heart;

No Architect (as I of verse)
He is Himself the Universe.

Said Rosy-kins: “Grandpa, how odd
Is your imagining of God.
To me he’s always just appeared
A huge Grandfather with a beard.

OK then. . . I give up, I give up, I surrender utterly. I throw myself on the ground and beg. What does the poem mean? Why did this surge up from some dire trench in my fevered brain? It was all mixed up and wrong, of course. I first read an excerpt from it at the start of a chapter of a goddamn book that I am goddamned if I remember. It was a misquote that really read much better than the "real" version:

God is the Izness of the Is,

The Oneness of our Cosmic Biz.

Doesn't that sound a lot more harmonious than the bumpety version I've posted? But it's on every site (public domain, I might add, like everything I post, harrumph) in this strange form that doesn't scan. Doesn't scan! And it's Robert Service.

Robert Service who wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Quick Draw McGraw and The Defrosting of Frank and all that stuff we were forced to learn in grade school.

"When you're out in the wild, and you're lost like a child, and death looks you bang in the eye. . . " What next?

I couldn't even find this poem because I assumed it was called Cosmiz Biz or some-such thing. I have no idea why he had to call it Rosykins (with its vaguely pedophilic connotations) and bookend his philosophy with such gooey Victorian sentiment. Little Rosykins reminds me of that windup Edison doll spouting the kind of sweetness that makes you want to drop-kick it into the nearest sewer.

But this Cosmic Biz stuff still seemed pretty good in my mind. The lark, the shark, the cloud, the clod. In a sense the old coot is kinda progressive, in that he does not think of God as the "architect" who "made" all this stuff: "he" (pardon the archaic term) actually IS all these things.

Interesting philosophy, but how does one "worship" this pan-adoration of all nature-and-things? What IS worship, anyway, and doesn't it sound a bit heathenish, like sticking something up on a pole or having a drain in the middle of the floor for blood sacrifice?

I wonder about this stuff all the time, I really do. It comes down to the idea of a "personal God", a God that cares for each of us, loves us unconditionally, accepts and forgives our foibles and sins. So that even the very hairs upon your head are numbered. Oh how we long for this. Long long long and deeply yearn for a Someone or a Something (more likely Someone, as it's more personal and parental or even grandparental) that enfolds us and understands us, that "made" us somehow, formed us in the womb so that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Trouble is, there is not an ounce of proof for this. The world is full of dizzying hate, and if we are made in God's image so that we reflect his finest work, God is in deep trouble and had better watch out.

I wanted, needed, sought the personal God, tried to find it/him in Jesus who seemed to represent something I could hang on to. I read Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Hound of Heaven and tried to extract meaning, however obscure. For a while, oh yes, for quite a while I seemed to be doing it.

But it was all so - what? Wispy. I could not grab hold anywhere. I could only glimpse God out of the corner of my eye. When I turned, "it" was gone like mist evaporated in a flash. Or Pan ducking back behind the tree with a demonic chuckle.

I have glimpsed, felt "something" in the unthinking, selfless love of some (very) few individuals who love without loving or even thinking about it, who "are" love in fact, seamless. I have known, I think, two and a half of them (I am married to half of one, but I don't blame him. I stole the other half and devoured it.) I had a grandmother, and I knew a man in AA who did remind me of my grandmother, and everyone he knew felt like his favorite because in a way, they were. I have wondered if my grandmother, my mother's mother, perhaps saved my life by providing me with the only sure sign of love I ever knew.

So is this "God" or just human goodness, or are they the same? Once there was nothing, now there is something, yes, and how, and we are about to destroy it all too. It can go back, back to just nothing. From the void to the void.  Just as my life went from chaos, to grace, and back to chaos again. Now I sift through the ruins of my faith and find a bone here, a tooth there. Maybe I can match it up with some chart. Some scripture, like that incomprehensible Gospel of Thomas I looked up after seeing that silly Stigmata movie (only worth seeing for Gabriel Byrne, the impossibly gorgeous, completely-believeable-as-an-Irish-priest-forever-caught-in-a-crisis-of-faith-but-still-capable-of-loving-especially-that-nubile-young-woman-from-the-coffee-shop-who-eventually-channels-some-saint-or-other-and-provides-the-world-with-a-brand-new-and-completely-revolutionary-and-thus-potentially-Church-destroying-message-directly-from-Jesus-himself).

The Gospel of Thomas, I'm sorry Thomas, was a goddamn mess, just a jumble with no connective tissue. The "sayings" and "teachings" were like a jigsaw puzzle that had tipped out of its box onto the floor. Squiggly little pieces of meaning are not enough.

I seek, and I don't find. Not really. I carry on, and I worry. Things leap into my head, anxieties. I laugh and cry, and have orgasms, and function pretty well thankyouverymuch, in the usual way, but - what's missing? A little Cosmic Biz?

Grandfather: what does it all mean?

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Is Don Draper really a vampire? and other depressing questions

It's not every day, well, it's almost every day but never mind, that we find, that I find I mean, uh. Let me start over again.

I don't even know how I YouTubed my way into this one. Every once in a while I profess my rabid, tree-scratching, hide-tearing, rubbing-salt-into-my-private-areas LUST for AMC's Mad Men. It's the smartest show I've ever seen, even though, at the base of it all, it's nothing more than a sexy and well-acted soap opera.

Angst rules supreme. Nobody is ever really happy. This makes us all feel better about ourselves, because, you see, WE'RE never really happy either. Or at least, I'm not.

Privately, I believe that happiness is for idiots, or at least for people who don't think or don't notice the intractible mess all around them. I have moments of it, of course. Even serious upgusts. But angst remains my prevailing mood, and that's when I am not downright depressed.

So Mad Men cheers me up. The way the characters hurl themselves at their fate, impaling themselves on ill fortune, screwing around madly just to forget. They beat their fists on reality. They don (!) mask after mask, phony disguise after phony disguise, hoping THIS one will be the charm, and it never is.

And saaaaaaaay, isn't that some coincidence that we have a character named Don (as in Don Quixote; as in Don Juan; as in The Godfather; as in "don we now our gay apparel") Draper, as in let's throw a tarp over all this mess before anyone sees it (too late!). And that's not even his real name: he has "donned" it like a "drape" over his somewhat vampirish personality. His real name, Dick (!) Whitman, does not need to be examined (though Walt Whitman may sneak in there somewhere: but hey, wasn't he queer or something?).

We could sit here and analyze every character's name - Jesus, Roger Sterling?? - Lane Pryce?? - but I'm getting very tired. I am so addicted now that even when whatsisname, that Weinerhead guy, spews out a substandard episode, I still watch it at least three times. Then I go on the message boards and see what arcane, cabalistic meanings the fans have squeaked out, adding a few of my own ("hey, Cool Whip isn't real whipped cream!"). When I found this video I thought, great, I get to see Don's new sexpot wife Megan make a total fool of herself (again) and be the only person in the room who doesn't know. But then. . .

Then I realized that my two greatest loves, Mad Men and Mr. Trololo, had somehow met and blended, had fused together and become one, and it was magical!

There is a certain affinity between the two songs, after all, a certain bouncy optimism. Surely Don needs this sort of frisson of joy, this gasping souffle, this seething birthday pie that he can stick his thumb in any time he wants to. Megan may have big scared eyes and teeth that are completely over the top, but she's HAPPY damn it, and is going to make DON happy ("yes, master!") too, even if she won't eat the orange sherbet at Howard Johnson's.

Ye-ye-ye-ye-ye, ye-ye-ye, ye-ye-ye, o-ho-ho-ho-ho!


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Teetering on the brink

After writing my yearbook-nostalgia piece about 1966, I had to do a little digging about the songs that were popular back then.

Ye gods and little fishes! What happened? How could there be such an explosion of passion and talent and innovation, cheek-by-jowl with the most inane slop?

I can't name them all here, but I went on the Billboard Top 100 for '66 and just pulled out a few, not randomly but because they caught my eye and/or I liked/remembered/hated them.

There was an idiotic thing called 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. The DJs on CKLW Detroit ("Windsor and Detroit know/It's Radio Eight-oh!"), which we all slavishly listened to every day, must've had a bit of trouble with that one. Then there was Red Rubber Ball by a band called The Cyrkle, who might as well have named themselves The Oblivions.

The Lovin' Spoonful, who were many-hit wonders and (at their best) superb, scored a couple of big ones: Summer in the City (which still evokes for me those sweaty, cicada-chanting days in Chatham when I slept over at Shawne Aitken's house and played Archie and Veronica. Never mind) and a real gem called Did You Ever Have to Make Up your Mind.


Rumor has it that this was based on the bees-buzzing-around-honey effect Joan and Mimi Baez seemed to have on men during the height of the folk craze, and Richard Farina's big dilemma: which one to suck up to? (He finally chose Mimi before dying in a motorcycle accident a couple of years later.) Even Bob Dylan went through the "make up your mind" bit before shunning both of them. Their father Albert Baez must have been relieved.

Oh, and the Mamas and the Papas, laid-back but somehow completely focused, with their voices so perfectly meshed that they sometimes created alarming, spinning overtones in the studio that whirled like little tornados above everyone's head. This seldom happens except with those rare operatic sopranos whose high notes can shatter glass.


They put out Monday Monday that year, the song that makes absolutely no sense when the lyrics are analyzed ("so good to me"? The rest of the song vilifies it.) The rest of the group didn't even want to do it, it sounded so lame: a day of the week? Later they came out with one of their most brilliant '60s anthems, California Dreamin'. (My personal fave is Twelve Thirty, a haunting memoir of the life of a young prostitute. Their heyday was so short that this must have followed soon after.)

Oh, and. Donovan was getting big then, with Sunshine Superman. This one reminds me of the smell of oil paints. Yes. Shawne and I used to do paint-by-numbers, as well as stroll over to the park where perverts were known to hang out. Associations are weird. Last Train to Clarksville reminds me of peanuts. Paperback Writer is hoppity as a hot hen. 

Then there's Nowhere Man. What had happened to the Beatles, anyway? All their songs were getting so melancholy. We didn't know it, but it was the beginning of a gathering storm.

Oh, there are tons of others, Wild Thing, Good Vibrations, Rainy Day Women #12 and 35: but as good as these sounded then, I can't get into them now. I loved Walk Away Renee and found this strangely beautiful video, I found Summer in the City badly lipsynched on one of those teen shows (where no one ever performed life). I am a little afraid to look up Twelve Thirty or Ruby Tuesday (which came later, and which for some reason tear my guts out).

Noel Coward or some snoot like that once said, "Amazing how potent cheap music can be." I'd reverse that. Those 45 rpms only cost a couple of bucks back then. Amazing how cheap potent music can be.


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Fifty Shades of Grey: yearbook photos

I was going to title this post Daydream Believer, because this-here lovely young lady is a Homecoming Queen from that succulent year, 1966.

It's a strange coincidence that my fall-down-and-worship slavish addiction, Mad Men, is right now in the midst of that august (actually it's October) year. A year when the whole world seemed to be balanced on the point of a pin.

And here are the runners-up, complete with poofy hairdos and hopeful expressions. The Marlo Thomas look vies with the '60s beehive and side-flip that will all-too-soon give way to two curtains hanging sullenly on either side of the face.

OK, here's the backstory: it all had to do with painting. When you paint, every century or so, you generally repaint the closets, which means a major purge. Which yielded what seemed like dozens of yearbooks from junior/high school. Most of these belonged to my kids, and we spent a hilarious evening reading the scrawled comments out loud to each other. My son's wife Crystal kept bursting into whoops of laughter so loud it raised the roof (that is, until she saw a spider, jumped straight up in the air and disappeared upstairs for the rest of the evening).

But the choicest cut was this one. Turns out my husband Bill, now 65, kept one yearbook from all his university-hopping days: the Brown and Gold from the University of Manitoba, circa 1966. That year when things were still just barely teetering on the side of innocence.

That skateboarding fiend above is mysteriously captioned ATHLETIC PROGRAM. The skateboard looks to be a handmade job cobbled together using rollerskates and  a piece of plywood.

Here we have an even more enigmatic mystery: the Rifle Club, consisting of two pistol-packin' mamas. No boys in sight (so to speak), but is it any wonder?

Some clubs, we noticed, had only one member, but we could find no pictures. Too excruciating, I guess. But the elections would be fast.

Ah, 1966, when accountancy was still Not Boring!

Hey look, everybody. . . it's Robert Vaughn!

The Rhodes Scholar. No one smiles in these things. Where is he now, I wonder? He might be dead. Dear God! Most of my high school teachers must be dead by now, and all of my grade school teachers. How did that happen?

One of the racier, lovelier photos in the collection, found in "candid shots" which look anything but candid. "C'mon, Peggy Sue. . . lie on your stomach." Come to think of it, that IS pretty racy.

And here he is, MY Rhodes scholar, looking deadly earnest, complete with Big Bang Theory glasses. (When I met him in 1972, they were held together with tape.) I had a thing about science nerds even then, though I have to admit that in 1966 I was only 12 years old.

In 1967, I heard the word "hippie" for the first time, but wasn't sure what it meant. In 1968, I first heard the sound track to the musical Hair and began to get stoned to Donovan records ("First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. . . ").

By 1969, Woodstock exploded, the unwitting pinnacle of that magical, idealistic time which all too quickly plummeted into the dirty rotten shame of Altamont.

But the kid from Manitoba grew up, and lived through all the rich and rough and bumpy times since then. As did we all.

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