Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

The post-rainfall Wisconsin worms were fat, long, everywhere. It took forever to walk to school those days, as I methodically calculated each footstep. To avoid squishing them, releasing even more of the pungent earthy smell I hated. To avoid accidentally cutting one in two, creating two separate worms that would live where there once was one.

Frozen, one leg raised, carefully testing down with only my toes, then teetering and re-balancing while I scanned the next two-foot circumference to find the least worm-occupied place for my next step. Nose scrunched, my whole body scrunched, I tried not to inhale. I lived just two blocks, one long, one short, from Bayside Elementary school, but those days the walk was interminable, an invertebrate gauntlet for the easily grossed-out.

I cursed my size 9 feet. My larger-than-my-Mom’s feet. My feet so seemingly big she’d tell the salesman the same line on our annual back-to-school clothes-and-humiliation outing: “She’ll just wear the boxes home.” I didn’t know women’s feet went all the way to 11, like Nigel Tufnel’s guitar amplifier. I thought mine were the largest feet ever grown. I longed for dainty feet, small feet that could fit, flat, between the worms. I wanted to walk gracefully. On petite feet. Delicate feet.

I had big feet. Big hair. A big mouth. Big plans. Big ideas. Big dreams. A big shiny eyesore rain coat. Big clunky rain boots. I clomped and stomped, my worm-dodging en pointe more like storybook Hattie or Helena or Hilda, storybook hippos with an H name, as if you couldn’t have a hippo named Mary or Brenda, and not that the hippos were fat, just the opposite of graceful. My elementary school was filled with poised and polished, thin and long-waisted, straight fly-away-haired, wiry small-footed girls in ballet leotards whereas I shuffle-ball-changed and smacked my single, then later, double-taps, on the hardwood floors.

I don’t know the Native-American spirit of worms; they were omitted from the First Nations zodiac cycle in favor of creatures with a bit more, shall we say, spine? Kevin Costner achieved courage and passion in his dance with wolves. I achieved awkward terror and revulsion: pause, pause, cringe, cringe, oooh gross, pause, pause, just go! To this day I perform the worm tip-toe dance, half of me perched precariously on one foot in the face of any unwanted challenge. I freeze in fear of the misstep that will create two slimy tendrils of oozy awfulness where there once was one.

Turns out the Native Americans did acknowledge the worm. The last full moon of winter is the Worm Moon, said to illuminate worm trails that appear in newly thawed ground. I wonder if my worm trails are still visible now that last season’s protective freeze has thawed. In one previous life, my ex was the possessive, arrogant and over-demanding Beaver baring his razor sharp teeth in combat with my pragmatic, methodical, eventually lifeless Bear. Jewish girls from the suburbs were not trained to seek their inner animal spirit, lived only with dogs or cats or gerbils or, for a few weeks each year after the Purim carnival, a single goldfish. These are also mysteriously absent from the Native American zodiac. I knew how to track the Doctor, and the Lawyer, but not the Owl, who would have more ideally balanced my own Bear.

I didn’t outgrow squeamishness. I opted out of the human brain autopsy segment in my post-doc, sitting far back and turning my head about 10 degrees left of the clustered mob so my professor couldn’t tell I couldn’t see, while the others committed whole-body assaults to end up in front, eager and excited to see exactly what a face looks like with the skin pulled back. I nearly fainted in my middle school organ dissection classes, skewered frogs and cow eyeballs. I was horrified when forced to stick my hand in a Halloween bowl of peeled grapes and told it was a bowl of eyeballs – what is it about eyeballs? – I would have stopped trick-or-treating altogether. No candy was worth the faux blood-splattered masks that chased me down the block, the very same block of the worms, my enormous un-costumed feet smooshing and pulverizing them all the way back to my front door, my plastic orange treat pumpkin nearly empty, my Father upset that I hadn’t brought back enough Baby Ruth’s, my Mother polishing another single story line, how I made such a big deal out of nothing.