Demos and Monsters

 

Demos and monsters are joined at the hip Oak campus, where all students are expected to take part in demonstrations. They like to demonstrate “Demon’s Treat,” a blend of jest and devilry that’s celebrated twice—on April 1 and October 31. 

Actually, I made up “Demon’s Treat,” along with its  “trick-or-fool’s” dates of observance.  But what demos and monsters do have in common is the Latin root monstrare, which means “to show or demonstrate.”  A monster is a demonstration usually of darker significance, perhaps to show how unnatural nature can be, with a hint of monere, ‘to warn.” A demo and monster may even overlap. When some huckster offers a slick demo that isn’t on the level, there may be more than a little “beware!” about it. The monster’s flawed nature may even trump nature’s flaws! (See what I did there? “I did the mash—I did the monster mash!”!  I did the mash! It was a graveyard smash…”) I love that dirge.

This news reel is about different monsters, including the innocent, misunderstood, and demonstrably no good. The path starts at Spy Pond playground in Arlington, a frequent destination for my festinating footsteps (the “stutter-stepping” I sometimes lapse into, not monstrous, I hope. Recently, while biding my time in a bide-a-loo, I happened to hear a chant outside. It turned out to be from a daycare teacher who was taking roll-call for organizing fun & games with her kindergarteners. The chant went:  “Hickety-pickety bumblebee! Won’t you say your name for me?” Repeated over and over, name after name. Blake! Marisol! Peppy!

I don’t know how the little ones responded to the name-saying, assuming they played along. I was more focused on the daycare teacher who started the verse. I became obsessed with the upward inflection she drew out of “Won’t you say your name for MEEEE??  It reminded me of the madness in Poe’s “The Telltale Heart ”. There, it was the pallid eye of the old man that pushed his housemate over the edge. For me it was (or threatened to be) the agonizing cuteness of the likes of Barney the Dinosaur. But I was no lunatic, unless that label applies to a conflicted hanger-on to his own childhood mementoes. (This little piggy has all ten toes!) The buzzkill part of me refused to swear allegiance to the bumblebee, just as the childish part esteemed it. Esteem prevailed. Hickety-pickety, double-checked on Google, found a home in my notepad and in due course, here.

Behold! Food!

I knew in the heart of me that the daycare kids ate up this hickety-pickety tapioca with a spoon. After all, I had dispensed this same goo as a daycare teacher myself from British Columbia  to Massachusetts. I even admit to having been a monster-for-hire on more than a few playgrounds. More on that to follow. But first, let me roll out the old wanted poster to introduce a few other monsters that have lately crossed my path. One was a giant. Another was a fellow playground foe. A third was a hero. 

One was a giant? Is a giant a monster? Sometimes. By and (extra) large, they’re treated separately in wIcked-pedia and Go Ogle, my standard references for tallying evildoers. But why split hairs between the folktale giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the accidents of nature, mad lab experiments, and children’s fears come to life, that are visited upon us as monsters. Most, but not all, storybook giants are monstrous. Many but not all monsters reach gigantic proportions. I’m not here to stir up any enmity, boys. I’m just trying to add some data for the wanted poster.  Good luck trying to identify Jack’s giant, by the way. Was it Blunderbore? Are you sure it wasn’t Thunderdell? Or Galligantus? How about Gogmagog? Some are two-headed; some are even three-headed. Frankly, I’m more interested in the chant the giant says–call it an early descendant of “hickety pickety bumblebee.” I’m referring to the infamous incantation that goes “Fee fie fo fum; I smell the blood of an Englishman.  Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!” The English half of the chant is scary enough: smelling blood, making flour from ground bones. But for me the greater threat lay in those four faceless words, fee, fie, fo, fum. It was the fear of the undefined, approaching.

Undefined no more. I might have guessed that help would come from Charles MacKay, 19th c.  Scottish author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. But it was another MacKay book, Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of  Western Europe, that told the giant’s tale. According to the popular Scot, fee fie, fo, fum and a fifth syllable, fa, conceal a  coded story of bad blood between Gaelics and Saxons. The syllables, McKay maintains, are short for five Gaelic words: faich, fiadh, fiu, fough, and feum; and those words stand for a sentence that a giant might indeed declaim upon discovering an English trespasser in his castle: In English, it translates as “Behold! Food!—good to eat—enough to satisfy my hunger!” 

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Behold! Monsters, including giants, are essentially a human demo, filling a human need, be it to warn away Saxons or to fulfill the godlike fantasy of a Doctor Frankenstein. Most monsters probably aren’t aware that they are monsters. The gila monster of the American Southwest isn’t trying to live up or down to its name. It’s just a lizard trying to make a living (venomous? ¡vamonos!), targeting baby birds in particular. Impressing  humans is just a sideline, . As for Cookie Monster— Who need sideline ? Me got cookie! And if there’s no daylight between Cookie Monster and cookie-munching people, the same might be said about an unlikely monster called the Bird Whisperer.

Alicia and the Robins

This true story takes place in mid-July. As with Jack and the Beanstalk, the trouble started with a well-meaning  trespasser. And as is the case with gila monsters, it was a young bird that needed saving.—from a den of monsters known as OSIB-P—aka ”Our screened-in back porch.”

The young bird was a robin, half-grown, yellow-billed, and speckled with brown spots. With the help of a gaping hole in the wire mesh of Osib P, the adolescent thrush had found its way into an alien place, calling for coping skills it had not yet developed. Except for one: putting out a call for help in plaintive robinese. How likely that the call would be heard and answered? Likely enough that an adult robin, a female (and probably the Mom) flew over to the juvenile’s patch of screen and tried coaxing it to accept worms through holes in the mesh. The suggestion did not take. Nor could we rush the pace of evolving a higher intelligence to enable the kid to figure out that the entrance hole could double as an exit hole. But the call for help still had pull. Who should appear in our makeshift prison as a co-inmate, in a touching display of familial solidarity, but Mom herself! Would two heads prove smarter than one, allowing the penny to drop or the worm to turn? Alas, not even Mom, having just solved for in, could complete the equation for out. Meanwhile, the word had apparently spread through the yard about the porched-in pair. Robins were streaking by outside by the half-dozen, making a distressed racket I had never heard robins make before.

Now it is time to introduce the Bird Whisperer, with a practical but heroic musical theme arranged for oboe. Our houseguest, Alicia D., had arrived in town to perform (she’s a vocalist) over three nights.We explained the situation with the trapped robins. Mass Audubon had not responded to our calls. Bay State wanted too much money. Yet something about Alicia inspired confidence. I watched her move carefully toward the young robin. Listened to her talk to it softly in that same gentle coaxing tone adults have used to gain the trust of children and animals since the dawn of civilization. Crouching, soothing, wielding no alarming paraphernalia except for a pair of work gloves, somehow Alicia crossed a boundary with the robins, yielding neither to trust nor terror but letting in confusion, at least. And the result of that was a kind of frank magic. First the juvie submitted to the persuasion of the Bird Whisperer’s  glove, and then about ten minutes later, so did the adult.  I watched in amazement as the two robins, their yellow bills agape (with fear or uncertainty) submittied to being carried down to the backyard porch, where both promptly demonstrated their ability to fly. Maybe that’s when their gratitude and glory kicked in—proving their freedom to themselves.

Okay, so who’s the monster in this story? Not the birds; they’re the victims. Not Alicia; she saved the day. Could it be the story, the situation itself? Nah. Let’s go back to Alicia. Her status as the hero seems unchallenged, but did the birds buy in? All they knew was the crazy sensation of being scooped up by the Big Biped, the fee-fie foe, facing an unknown fate. Did the robins discern the grabber’s peaceful intentions? Doubtful. Until events suggested otherwise, the Bird Whisperer, or all of us big bipeds, were and are the monster!

Is that a problem or an opportunity? Both, I suppose. (Interesting to compare the rescue of the robins with my complicated attempts at saving the woodpecker and the dove [see “Golfing with Susi dog”]) So, yes, half-problem, half-opportunity. They usually pair up anyway. But the opportunity to be a monster—and to change what that state means—doesn’t often arise.

I can think of one example in literature: the character of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. For most of the book, Boo was known as the neighboorhood weirdo: reclusive, creepy, stigmatized, and undergoing some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Only at the very end, having been befriended by young Scout, did Boo have the chance to change from being the monster to the hero.

Being the Lava Monster

Few opportunities arose in my first attempts at being a monster-for-hire in another playground, far far away. Well, maybe one lesson did. I  was an aide-de-camp in a variety of after-school care programs. In no time, I recognized that my most compelling role with the kids was that of Monster, and not the obviously metaphoric kind. The growling, roaring, spinning and lifting kind, the more realistic the better.

Time wounds all heels, as we know, and time shortened the reign  of my Blunderbores and Galligantuses, as the kids put on weight and I conceded energy. There was a revival with the arrival of Matthew E. Ober, but my freelance career as monster was in its waning days I found writing for kids more to my liking than monstering. Also there was that one lesson I alluded to upstairs, which is neither pro- nor anti-monster. Practice kindness.

Which brings me back to Hickety-pickety Bumblebee and to the Lava Monster—the resident monster of the Spy Pond playground. I was drawn by the screams and the “Na na na boo boo” chants of you-can’t-catch-me. It was all so familiar, except for the replacement of one sacrificial adult with a rotating “It parade” of willing kids. And who was this lava monster anyway? It turned out to have a bunch of guises: a creature made of molten lava in the Disney film, Moana, set in Hawaii; at least a dozen so-named characters in fantasy video games; and the subject of a free-form park and playground game in which the players are pursued by the monster who has the ability to turn the floor or other surfaces into lava! Definitely a worthy heir to the nameless demos of danger that the chasers and the chased kept alive. It seemed a good opportunity for a poem to end this newsreel with, perhaps a poem called “Being the Lava Monster.”

Child’s play it may be 
but some say that 
“Ring Around the Rosie” 
is about The Black Death: 
with the telltale red rash,
the protective posies,
the sneezes (hash-oo! hash-oo!)
and all fall down.

Fact checkers say “Fake!”
There’s no plague round
this playground
But children know
it’s a scary place
full of daunting,
taunting.
and haunting. 

Already the youngest scream in terror
running from the Lava Monster.
Why do they provoke him so?
Don’t they know how infuriating it is 
to be jeered with“Na na-na boo boo!” over and over, 
like snapping a red cape at a bull, 
chanting, “Here, bully bully bully.”
Don’t fall for that bullcrap
You know what you’re meant to be: You’re It.

Good news!
They want you.
They need you 
to be the Lava Monster
pursued by a swarm of tormentors
pursuing their imaginations
My suggestion: Play along.
What’s the worst they can say to you?
“I’m rubber; you’re glue”?
Your comeback’s way worse.
In fact, it’s the ultimate curse:

“Oh, 
grow up.”