Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail

Chapter 4: No Person Does Not Have a Misery

You're probably as familiar with Linus and Lucy, Charlie Brown, Pigpen, Snoopy, Schroeder— all the Peanuts characters— as you are with the kids in the next block. And you've probably read not only Charles Schulz's comic strips but also his "concept" books— books that take an idea or concept and describe it from all sorts of directions. "Happiness is a Warm Puppy." "Security is a Thumb and a Blanket."

Shortly after the first of these came out, a little book was published called Misery, by Susan Heller. "Misery is when you spend your last ten cents on a Good Humor and it falls off the stick." "Misery is when you are the fattest kid in the class and it's time to go to the nurses office to be measured and weighed." "Misery is when it's Halloween and you are a ballerina and your mother makes you wear a coat and nobody can see your costume." "Misery is when you are riding in a car and everyone smells dog doody and you discover it's on your shoes." "Misery is when you bring the class hamster home for the weekend and it disappears into a mousehole."

Our family had this misery book with us, along with thirty other library books, on a camping trip. One evening while we were sitting with friends around the campfire and roasting marshmallows Megan, then about nine, studied a boiling blob on a log and remarked ruefully, "Misery is when the last marshmallow falls off your stick into the fire." That got us going. Demi said, "Misery is seeing a big fat spider walk across your toothbrush," and Jill, "Misery is having to go to the bathroom in the woods and there are fifty million mosquitoes." My contribution was, "Misery is when in the middle of a camping trip your nine-month-old baby refuses all baby food and wants only hot dogs." For a while the miseries centered around camping miseries, but then we gradually found ourselves— adults and kids alike— going into the past for our miseries: "Misery is when you have warts on your hands and you play circle games at recess, and you know that nobody wants to stand next to you."

I found myself dredging up buried miseries that were so deep and personal that I'd never had the courage to tell them to anybody before, and I realized the others were doing the same. It was easy to tell our own miserable experiences in this anonymous way, in the midst of a good-humored and sympathetic gathering. Each of us was trying to outdo the others in miseries, as if to say, "Sure, that was pretty miserable all right, but wait till you hear this one!

For me this telling was a window into the secret spots of my children, framing unhappy experiences that I'd never known about, or if I had, that I hadn't realized. In fact, I was sometimes the cause of them! I was allowed to see from the child's point of view what before I'd only seen from the mothers, or not even seen at all. This window revealed my hisband and our friends. I also gave everybody a window to myself, one that showed both my childhood miseries and my grown-up ones.

We must have sat there for two hours, cheerfully recalling more and more wretched miseries while we poked sticks into the glowing embers of the fire. It was a remarkable time of warmth and depth, of real communication. Everybody sensed it. Later I thought, why didn't we talk about "Happiness is," or "Security is"? Why just "Misery is?"

I thought of Alison, a friend who's in college now but who was four when a group of us, all ages, were discussing the good and the bad, whether you remember one more than the other. Somebody asked Alison's opinion and without a second's hesitation she declared, "The bad! Becky squashed my bug!"

Do we really remember the bad more than the good, the miseries more than the happinesses? Or is it that we rememer the details of the miseries? I had a happy childhood on the whole, and especially happy were the seven summers we spent at a small lake in Southern Wisconsin. Yet when it comes to remembering specific moments of emotion, it's usually the more traumatic that I recall in sharp picture. The happiness is diffused over all those summers in a sort of blissful glow, but I can still feel the horror and guilt, and see the black soot on my father's silver baby mug after I used it to brew acorn tea, and thought I'd ruined it. And what about that acute discomfort when I, a lofty lake dweller, decided to honor the Girl Scouts at their camp with a social call, and then found they absolutely ignored me? And the helpless outrage I felt when I was hauled, struggling, crying, and dripping, into the rowboat by Paul, my older cousin? He was tending us for the day and I'd gotten mad and screamed, "I'm leaving! I'm going to swim across the lake!" and I'd stomped down to the dock, flung myself in, clothes and all, and struck out for the far shore. Even as I write this, I can see Paul's fiendish grin, and the flaky paint on those rowboat gunnels, and the bilgy water in the boat bottom. Also those flabby Girl Scouts sprawled in their tents reading comic books and popping bubble gum. The strong emotion of each specific horror has frozen the whole thing into a picture, including, sometimes, the actual words someone spoke.

Is this true for you? Do you remember the miseries more clearly than the happinesses? Can you remember one, from this morning, or last week, or last year, that is especially miserable and especially vivid?

A list is a good place to begin. See how many you can get. You don't need to limit yourself to calling them just miseries, either. There are lots of forms of misery, and you might be more explicit: "Panic is when you're in a big crowded department store and you find out the person you've been following isn't your mother." "Boredom is having no one to fight with you." "Disaster is overflowing your friend's toilet!"

You might even let a happiness creep in, if you recall a clear one: "Contentment is the cat under the covers at the foot of your bed. You can feel her purring with your toes." "Joy is visiting your mother in the hospital and the operation has turned out ok."

Then, when you have a good strong list of miseries and other emotions (and not just top-of-the-head ones; go for those deep-down-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach ones) you have a gold mine for writing a story. For writing lots of stories. The lists are fun, but the stories are more fun, for now you take the feeling that you wrote with the most relish ("Satisfaction is hitting my brother over the head with an egg"), or the most grief ("Misery is when you get a little baby sister. Then you are no longer thought of.") or the most quaking of your innards ("Misery is not being able to find your paper and you know you did it," or "Misery is when the teacher makes you write a note to your parents"), and you think it through. You go from the bare bone, the spark of the idea, to details about the where and how, and the more of these, the better. What caused you to remember that misery, that feeling? How did it start? What happened? How did people look, speak, feel? How did you look, speak, feel? And how did it end— if it has?

I wish the boy who wrote the "kissing the hem of the dress" misery had given us the whole story: I imaging an old-fashioned play, full skirts, maybe Columbus being grateful to Queen Isabella, and the horrible moment coming up when the fellow playing Columbus has to drop to his velvet knee and kiss the sweeping skirt. Imagine the supressed snickers of the rest of the class! The haughty queen is probably a girl he either likes or doesn't like, but either way is excruciating! And don't think it isn't just as bad for her. I once refused to be a queen in a play, because I had to say "Yes, my darling" to the king, and take his hand.

Demi wrote out a list of embarrassments the other day. I enjoyed particularly the first one because it was a recent incident that I was a part of. She said, "Embarrassment is when you have been stealthily trailing your family through the woods and you suddenly realize that your mother has been trailing you." There it is, just a little sentence and you get the picture, but I think that it would be an interesting story for Demi to write up in detail. She could tell her feelings, why she abandoned her family when they were out hiking together in the woods, why she hung behind until they'd gotten so far ahead that there were no longer in sight. Why, when they called her, she didn't respond. Why, instead, she stood behind a tree. What were her thoughts? We all have a need to be by ourselves. One of my scorns at the lake I've mentioned was the Girl Scout Camp, where the scouts were always, it seemed to me, doing things in great mobs. They would walk around the lake in a line that would take five minutes to go past our cottage. I used to think to myself, "What can anybody see on a hike with a hundred other people? Anything worth seeing gets trampled or scared away before you get there." Demi probably had some of these same feelings, "I'm out here in the woods, I want to be alone, I don't want to be with my family, I'm always with my family." She also wanted us to worry about her, a little, maybe, to cause us a little inconvenience. When she didn't catch up, I doubled back to speed her up. I went stealthily myself, because I suspected she was feeling this way. When I finally spotted her I hid behind a tree and allowed her to come along past me. She would pause; examine oak bolls or mushrooms; sometimes just stand vacantly, with thoughts moving behind her eyes. Her attention would be caught by noises, and her head would swivel up or around. She watched the path to be sure she was safe from the view of the family tramping noisily far ahead. I nearly laughed out loud, spying on Demi as she was spying on us. And then she spotted me!

There are two stories here, actually. Maybe you noticed that I switched midway from imagining Demi's thoughts to telling my own. She and I could each write our own story.

If you write out your misery tales you may find some benefits besides the fun of doing it, and having a good yarn to share when you're through. There were certain things that bothered me terribly when I was little, yet when I was older I looked back and thought, "That wasn't so awful— why did I agonize so?" And yet I had, waking in a cold sweat in the night. By seeing now that something really wasn't so horrible then, I sometimes can see my present miseries in more perspective. Maybe these, too, aren't quite so bad as I think.

Or, looking back, when I realize, "If I'd only tried to explain to my teacher, she might have understood," I make the leap of thought, "Perhaps there's some action I can take on this misery right now that will diminish it."

Of course, no misery is inconsequential when you're having it, whether you're four or fourteen or forty. What's miserable to a four-year-old is really miserable by his standards, and often by anybody's. It's always miserable to be kicked around, humiliated, or misunderstood. And it can really be a lot worse at four: you haven't the words to explain, or you don't understand as well, yourself. You aren't old enough, for instance, to realize someone's clobbering you because someone just clobbered him and he can't clobber back. (If understanding the why of a clobber makes it feel any better.) And too often people simply don't listen or understand, at any age. Also, at four you are just beginning to build up an inner callous (the way the soles of your feet harden from going barefoot) that allow you to shrug hurts off. You're more easily hurt because you haven't gotten used to hurts. That's one reason early childhood miseries are so vivid.

And then there are real solid miseries that can't be changed: "Misery is when your worst sister dies, even though you never liked her." Even these may be softened by writing them out.

Finally, when you are writing down your misery stories, you can't help but realize what a fourth-grader named Theresa wrote. "Misery is when you do not like something or someone. Every person has a misery. No person does not have a misery."

You. Me. Grandparents. Teachers. Little brothers. You'll come to understand people better, that we're all in together on the joys and miseries of humankind. And to know this— that we're not alone— helps us to live with misery. Real misery.

Linscott Charter School 220 Elm Street Watsonville, California 95076 (831) 728-6301