Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

11 year old son: “What are you going to write about today?”

Older than she likes to be mother: “I don’t know. What should I write about?”

Son: “Oooh, cheesy gophers!”

This is what I get for asking an 11 year old for this week’s writing spark. He’s still laughing, and I’m just a tad stuck. What, exactly, is a cheesy gopher? If I don’t use his suggestion, I run the risk of conveying to him that his ideas are less worthy than mine. If I do use it, I may lose all my readers.
Fortunately for my son, I have very few readers. Cheesy gophers it is.

Food is a big deal in our home. As we head out for errands, there is a fragrant beef stroganoff in the slow cooker, yet another of my let’s-have-people-for-dinner-and-I’ll-make-something-I’ve-never-made-before notions. Perhaps the likelihood of knowing how the meal will turn out, with people we’ve not had to our home before, is about as clear as knowing what a cheesy gopher is. Do you eat the furry thing? Is it cheesy like a bad joke? I wondered if he was making a cultural reference and I’m too doltish to know it. Is it a Minecraft term? Is it in a song he’s listening to? I officially listen to old-person’s music stations, and have decided in the last week to make a concerted effort to listen to the music of the younger generation, replete with metallic and over-synthesized voices, sexualized lyrics that make no pretense at being veiled (“I want to stay up, up, up all night and do it all with you” blared out of the giant amplifiers of last year’s PE class, the PE teacher apparently not at all concerned that elementary school kids are singing pop and hip-hop before they have developed the ability to isolate their hips from their legs and bellies and what it really means when they thrust those things in the direction of others), and headache-inducing back beats. So maybe all the middle school kids know what cheesy gophers are, and I’m simply out of the loop.

I googled “cheesy gopher” and misspelled it, typing “dheesy gopher” instead. I received a reply back, did I mean, “cheesy gopher”? For a moment I was relieved, thinking I’d find the reference, and be able to make a literary left turn to salvage this piece. No such luck. I did find a link to gophers and cheese dot com, a site for motorcycling in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minnesota must be known for gophers; growing up in Wisconsin I know full well that state’s association with cheese.

The second item that came up was a link to a forum titled, 1968-69 Stepchild Nation Cheesy Gopher Chapter. I am more confused than ever. It appears the website is for Buick V8 owners, and there’s a picture of a car that has been quite transformed, by the addition and removal of parts, from its original construction, whatever make or model that was. Are there now cars that are considered stepchildren? Is there a nation of stepchildren? And still, please, could someone tell me what the cheesy gopher means?

I didn’t bother to click further. The remaining websites were about food. Cheesy Velveeta skillet dinners, Hamburger Helper at some place called the Gopher grocery, cheesy instant potatoes, and something from people who don’t like cheese, proclaiming “it ain’t easy being anti-cheesy.”

That’s got just the right cadence to end up pounding out of oversized speakers, but only if the band who records it finds just the right video image to make it bold, and find just the right place for the hip thrust and the fist-in-the-air anthem stance.

Just before heading out of the room, leaving me with the impossible writing task, my son reminded me about the “giant hamster who wants to steal all your cheese.” He had asked me, the other day, when he was choosing to stay alone at the home while I ran an errand, what he should do if, while I was gone, a giant hamster comes who wants to steal all our cheese. I told him to give the hamster the cheese. He knows the odds of something bad happening in 15 minutes are so slim that he doesn’t have anything real to fear, that as a middle-schooler he must damp down fears in the effort of bravery, so instead of asking, “what if something bad happens while you’re away?” he asked instead about a giant cheese-mongering hamster.

He transformed his fear of the unknown and his sense of being too small to protect himself into his ability to best the giant usually-friendly rodents who share, with him, a love of cheese. He made the world at large, the one he is just on the cusp of entering – the one he hears about endlessly as being an unpredictable and scary place, with an economy that is failing, joblessness rates that are soaring, homeless individuals with cardboard signs on street corners, hurricanes and tsunamis earthquakes, and teenage girls everywhere – a little bit safer. His memory of transforming fears into manageable bits and then overcoming them has left him with laughter. He did it right.

It won’t be for much longer that his developing mind can protect him by sublimating big, dark, dangerous things into small, furry, friendly animals. But it can for now.

His fears of the unknown will, quite soon, shift to the very knowable adolescent fears. I don’t remember when my pre-teen fears came to be of real things. Social exclusion, not fitting in, being too (fill in the blank) for whatever situation I was in, not having enough (fill in the blank) of what I thought I wanted or needed at the time. Fears of being unliked, unable to be with the people I liked, fears of being too smart and simultaneously not smart enough. Fears of not knowing what on earth to do with a grown up body. Fears of leaving home. Fears of never leaving leaving home. Fears of acne and parties and when a body will develop and why it is happening or not happening yet and the ever-present fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.

All the things I fear now are way scarier than rodents and cheese. I worry about my parents’ declining health, the state of the economy, how on earth I’ll ever be able to send my son to college, what will happen to me in my old age with insufficient savings. Sure, I don’t like spiders and certainly get queasy when we find an unwanted rodent who has made its way under our house. But fear, true fear, the shape of my monsters, is dollar signs and hospital beds.
Today, it’s cheesy gophers. Tomorrow it will be girls and social acceptance. And one day he’ll worry about my declining health and how on earth he’ll afford to take care of me while at the same time providing for his own family.

May the time of cheesy gophers and cute furry monsters last as long as possible. Because what comes next is much harder.