Your Friendly Neighborhood Snail

This story is about being a good neighbor.

Allow me to explain something about myself. I have a personality quirk that some people find endearing and refreshing and other people find bizarre and mildly annoying.  I anthropomorphize everything—especially, plants and animals but even inanimate objects.  I talk to things as if they might in some way be human. I had to apologize to my body the other day for thinking disparaging thoughts about it.  Yesterday I thanked my feet for being so awesome. I passed by a bush this morning with thorns and little white flowers and exclaimed excitedly, “Are you a blackberry bush?!” I didn’t see little budding berries anywhere. But before I went on my way, I reassured the bush, “That’s okay I love you just as well.”  Often, as I walk down the sidewalk, a little bird or a squirrel pops up near by.  I always greet them with a friendly “Hello!” A few weeks ago I was in Newport sitting by the sea watching a little bunny hop around and eat grass. I was quiet so as not to disturb her dinner.  As I watched her all I could think was, “I wish you knew how much I love you.” I have always felt a deep tenderness toward the world and all of its creatures.

Important caveat: I hate spiders and I wish they would all die. Same goes for cockroaches and every bug with way too many legs and no counteracting cuteness factor. I don’t talk to them.  I scream, run away and campaign among the other humans present for their immediate eradication. If I’m alone, I suck it up and kill them myself—not without a lot of swearing punctuated with a fair amount of squealing and yelping. 

Everything else in the world I love and adore and talk with like a friend. Generally, these sentiments remain unvoiced thoughts but I sometimes speak out loud to non-humans. This kind of conversational, relational way of being in the world is such an intrinsic part of my internal life that I often do it off handedly and I forget that it is a little uncommon and unfortunately strange to many people. Every now and then I become particularly self-aware regarding this aspect of my character. In those moments, I really crack myself up. I had one of those moments last night. 

The rain started yesterday morning but didn’t really come full force until the late afternoon. The rain had finally let up a little and a friend and I were walking to the T. I was going to my small group; he was going to look at an apartment. We’ve both now forgotten exactly what we were talking about because our friendly conversation was abruptly interrupted by a very serious crisis. As we neared the end of our street I spotted three snails that had crawled out of the hedge and onto the sidewalk. 

“Oh, my god!” I blurted out. “Help me get them to safety!” I reached down and picked up two of them.

“Get that one.” I told my friend.

With a raised eye brow and a bemused grin, he reached down and picked up the third snail. We found a patch of leaves beside the hedge to set them on.  As we carried out our rescue mission I explained to him that, being small, gray and incredibly slow, these poor creatures, which were attempting to get away from their now flooded hiding places, had only succeeded in making themselves vulnerable to death by squishing.  I have been painfully aware of their plight since, months ago, after a light rain, I was on my way to the airport and accidentally squished one with my suitcase right in front of my apartment.  I felt so terrible. So when I saw three more snails stranded on the wrong side of the hedge I knew what I had to do. 

“I feel so bad for them,” I told my friend. “It’s really a shame they don’t have the capacity for cognitive thinking.”

My friend laughed and agreed that it was indeed tragic that they keep making the same mistake over and over.  If only they could reason it out—“Remember the last time it rained and Joe crawled out on the concrete to get away from the water and that big thing came out of the sky and squished him . . . I guess we should just crawl up on a leaf this time . . .”  

My friend and I parted ways leaving the snails to fend for themselves. I went to my small group and after met a good friend for drinks, all the while the weather getting worse and worse.  There was even flooding in some areas of the city.  By the time I got off the last bus home it was almost one in the morning and the heavy rain had given way to a cool humid wind. I’d been wearing my sandals all day and they were starting to rub in certain places so as soon as I stepped onto my street I took them off and carried them in my hands.  I wasn’t five paces down the street when I realized that every snail on my block had crawled out onto the sidewalk. I bent down and picked up the first one I saw so that I could get it to safety only to realize that he had already been crushed.  No! I felt my face wrinkle up in agony. I searched the ground and found a baby snail near by unharmed.  I rescued him—and another one and another. I trotted barefoot down my sidewalk rescuing snails from their imminent doom. 

“What are you doing out here?” I asked them, like a mother scolding a four-year-old she’d repeatedly warned.  Tisk, tisk.  I set them gingerly out of harms way feeling a deep sense of affection for them and a profound sense of satisfaction in protecting them from a terrible squish-death.

The sidewalk was lit by street lamps but was still dark in places where trash cans or trees interrupted the light.  As I stepped into one of these dark patches I felt a crunch under my bare heel only a nanosecond before a short ear-piercing scream ruptured the silence of my neighborhood. I had squished a snail.  I almost dropped my purse as I jumped and flailed my arms. I would have been calmer if I’d seen a ghost.

It took a second to regulate my breathing again.  Then moving more carefully and watching the ground even closer I proceeded on my way though not without a lingering sense of grief and sadness.  Soon I found another group of snails. I picked up the first one, turned him to face me and lectured—

“What are you doing out here?! I just squished one of your friends!! You do not belong on the concrete.  You. are. a. SNAIL.  It is not safe for you out here.”

I set him down on some leaves and moved his friends over with him scolding them under my breath.  They all just sat there looking stupid.  Poor things. They can’t help it.  All in all I probably saved twelve or fifteen snails on my way home. God knows what I must have looked like to anyone peeking out their window just then. I must've looked like a Whitfield patient, walking crouched low to the ground barefoot  at one in the morning, talking to no one in particular, screaming and jumping for no apparent reason. 

My roommate and friend were still up when I came in so I told them about my walk home. My friend made a joke about building a tiny fence around the yard to keep the snails safe—which I actually think is a brilliant idea. And since it’s clearly hard for them to climb up on leaves and rocks to get dry you could also put in some big flat stones so they would have a safe place to congregate when it rains. My friend insisted that even liberal save-the-snails environmentalists would care less about snails than I do.  Maybe.  But only because they care about snails in a more broad global sense and I care about the practical well-being of the snails right outside my door. I don’t know much about snails in general. I just know the ones in my neighborhood often get squished on the sidewalk when it rains. I’ve never signed a petition to save them and I don’t know which species are endangered but I should. My moving the neighborhood snails to safety and Green Peace (or whoever)’s campaign to protect habitats and limit toxic waste in the environment are in principle the same kinds of actions.  We have a responsibility to care for and protect life in our literal neighborhood as well as the worldwide neighborhood of creation. We were meant to live together in harmony rather than opposition.  I will have to apologize to the snails on my street for not doing more to make sure the world is a hospitable place for them and their endangered cousins. I’m not yet sure how else I can help them.  For now it will have to be enough for me to offer as much squish-death protection as I can. 

International Stupid

This story is about a versatile turn of phrase.

I was having coffee the other day with two of my friends who are Korean.  They are both international students—one is my classmate, the other I met because she needed help with English.  As we spoke my classmate expressed her increasing frustration at not being able to communicate complex ideas in English.

“I’m really smart in Korean!” She said emphatically.  Pointing to our mutual friend she added, “So is she!  She’s really smart in Korean.” 

“You’re smart in English.” I insisted.  I wasn’t just being nice.  Their intelligence is quite obvious to me.  

“No!” she insisted petulantly, “I am not international student. I am international stupid.” 

Her inventive eggcorn brought a round of laughter. 

“At least you’re funny in English,” I offered, “that’s really not easy. Humor doesn’t usually translate well.” 

“No!” She banged her fist on the table as we laughed again, “I am international stupid!”

No matter what I said, no matter what evidence I laid out to the contrary, my friend insisted that she was in fact an international stupid.  I couldn’t for the life of me convince her that she was, say, an international smart. Our friend agreed with my classmate—she also felt like an international stupid.  I insisted their intelligence was obvious and they insisted that I was an oddball and that most Americans found them incomprehensible and frustrating.

I wasn’t surprised by my friends’ remarks.  My roommate (the one who wants my cup of suffering for an ashtray) is an international student from Turkey.  Her experience here has been of the same sort as my Korean friends’.  People have trouble understanding her.   A couple of months ago she came home in a huff because she had been trying to buy her favorite tea at a tea shop and the clerk couldn’t understand her for a really long time. After a round of charades and word association she finally got the right tea but not before her blood pressure was through the roof.  When she finished telling me the story she demanded—“Tell me what I’m saying: Rose. Tea.”

I shrugged as I got up to go make some tea myself and repeated back, “Rose tea. Obvious.” I saw her eyes widen with outrage as I stepped out of her room. 

“Ah!!” She yelled, “This is all your fault!”

“What?!” I bolted.

She ran down the hallway after me with her fists raised, yelling in not-totally-mock anger—“You understand everything I say! This is all your fault, why my English won’t improving!!” 

My laughter crippled me before I got to the kitchen. “How is this my fault? What do you want me to do?”

“Be like normal American! Nobody can understand me. What’s your problem?!” 

“I don’t know, Sev. You’re not that hard to understand.” 

“Stop it.”

“You want me to pretend like I don’t understand you?”

“Okay.”

“No!”

“You’re the reason my English won’t improving!”

“Isn’t.”  I corrected her.  She stared at me blankly.

“Isn’t improving.” I clarified. She swore under her breath in Turkish and, to my great amusement, sporadically accused me of undermining her progress in English for the rest of the evening. 

Around the same time as this interaction I was told second hand that another Korean classmate of mine had been saying how great I was with international students. 

“You can say one word and she understands what you mean,” he had said.  I was surprised and encouraged by his comment.

The truth is until recently all of my closest friends here have been American.  I chose to attend grad school in Boston because I wanted to get to know people from different cultures but it proved to be harder than I expected.  My relationships with foreign students remained in the category of casual acquaintance. I found that my awareness of how little I knew of their culture and how easy it would be for me to say something offensive kept me at a polite distance.  Their English was difficult for me to understand.  I felt bad asking them to repeat themselves multiple times so mostly I just smiled and nodded and didn’t ask too many questions.  I had a hard time remembering their names or putting the right names with the right faces.  I felt really embarrassed that I couldn’t remember who they were and I was always afraid of hurting their feelings.  So we remained distant from one another. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap.  Then about a year and a half ago my Sevde moved in.  I felt the same toward her—unsure how to behave, anxious about accidentally offending her.  But I did get to know her and we became close.  As she told me about her experience in America, I realized that my behavior toward foreign students had been more hurtful than helpful. Here I was trying to save them from insult and actually I ended up making them feel that I didn’t have time for them and that they were not important to me or worth the effort it would take to work through the language and culture barriers that separated us.  They all felt like international stupids and I wasn’t helping.

So I stopped worrying so much about making people feel bad or showing my own cultural ignorance.  Now I try to let people know just how interested I am in their lives, how willing I am to do the hard work of communicating across barriers and even risk making a total fool of myself.  It’s not that complicated actually.  I shamelessly ask people to repeat themselves. I repeat back what I think I hear and give people a chance to correct me if I have misunderstood. And the closer I get to my international friends the better I am able to listen and understand, not only these particular persons but other foreign people as well. So I was deeply encouraged to hear my classmate’s comment.  I have learned to listen a little better this year. :)

And I’ve learned something else—I too am an international stupid. One night, when I was having dinner with my Korean friends, I said:

“There’s this awesome wisteria tree in Korea. I can’t remember where but it’s really famous. Do you know it?” 

They didn’t. I then remembered it is actually in Japan. I proceeded to offer up a series of Asian people/places that I thought were Korean that turned out to be, respectively, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Taiwanese.  We all laughed at me for committing the absurdly cliché faux paux of implying that all things Asian are the same. All I could think was—Frack. I’m an international stupid.

I think this every time my roommate mentions a country I couldn’t begin to locate on a globe. Or a political leader of whom I’ve never heard. Or when I realize I’ve been speaking in a culturally insensitive way. So yeah, realizing once again that I am an international stupid is a recurring event.  But I confess my ignorance and allow myself to be taught by others. Hopefully, with the help of my lovely friends, I’m on my way to becoming an international smart.  

That Thing Is An Ashtray

This story is about an unexpected conversation partner.

A couple of weeks ago I threw a pot for the first time.  Not across the room, just on one of those spinning things.  Wheels, I believe they’re called. If you’ve never thrown a pot, the idea is to get the clay exactly centered on the wheel.  So you build it into a column and then push it down into a lump over and over again, keeping it steady until there’s no hint of a wobble as it spins.  We watched a pro with Madonna arms do a demonstration.  I’m a little doughier than that so I was smart enough not to expect it to be as easy as it looked.  Our assignment was to make a “tear cup.”  We were asked to think either of our own suffering or the suffering of others and craft a representative “cup of suffering.”  So I sat down at my wheel and slapped my little lump of clay down as close to the center as I could and I began to build it up and push it down, build it up and push it down. I never got to the no-wobble zone. I learned quickly that the clay was not simply going to yield to whatever creative brilliance I attempted to force upon it.  This clay was not merely an extension of myself but an-other with which I had to work in tandem rather than work on.  Throwing pots turns out to be a dialogical process. I had tons of ideas for a tear cup and my clay rejected every single one.  The question I entered the process with was: How can I make this clay express my sense of suffering?  But that question got lost as I pushed the clay and the clay pushed back.  I put my whole body into steadying the clay.  The clay burned my hands.  I used more water.  The clay slipped through my hands and dissolved into mush.  I scrapped off my wheel and tried again.  As we worked on each other, the clay and I realized there were a limited number of options as far as tear cups were concerned.  We did not know each other well enough to do something complicated.  God knows I tried! But the clay kept breaking off in my hands. As the shape of my tear cup changed, so changed the metaphors with which I framed my suffering. I ended up with a little shallow bowl.  I cut it off the wheel.  As I sat at the table with my classmates I continued to work on my pot scrapping away sections and giving it a lip.  The end result was the pot you see at the top of this blog. 

            I loved my little pot, my little cup of suffering.  I thought it expressed exactly how I felt.  When my turn came, I explained to my classmates that I felt like a shallow pot, like a pot that couldn’t hold much.  I felt I hadn’t been shaped right but that perhaps I was growing deeper.  The grooves inside represented varying levels of depth and the possibility of growth.  Perhaps I had been misshapen but that shape was not permanent. The lip represented both the inability to hold much (if you tried to fill this with water it would quickly spill out) and also my hope that I will become a person who is always spilling over with love and joy.  Barb said she knew that pot was me as soon as I turned the lip out.  For her it represented hospitality and, a true Mississippian, I am known for that here.  Courtney said that me saying I was shallow was like Barb saying she wasn’t creative—a comment she made on the first day of class for which I promptly and repeatedly corrected her.  But that’s how I often feel these days. Shallow.  Unrooted.  Improperly formed.  Most of my classmates threw their little tear cups back into the bathtub of recycled clay at the end of class.  I took mine home in hopes I could find someone to fire it for me.  I wanted to save my little pot that I felt said so much about me. 

            As usual God had to argue about it.  I was walking down Harvard Avenue, staring at my little pot, and God plainly said to me, “I did not make you shallow.” She meant both that I was not shallow and that She had made me and no one else.  Her tone made that clear.  “I did not make you shallow.  And I certainly made you.”  Okay but I feel shallow. “You are deep.”  Right . . . note the sarcasm, God. “You are filled up with things you were not meant to hold.” I fell quiet inside.  God was right.  I am full of things I am not meant to hold.  “Your shape is perfect.”  Whoa. Okay, God, I have a mirror, let’s not get carried away. I felt God smile. “Your shape is perfect.”  My shape is perfect . . . I am deep . . . The words felt true and also really, really far away.  My eyes were wet and my heart was aching.  You always fracking do this! 

            I still loved my little pot even though its meaning was now a little confused.  A few days after I brought it home I was showing it to my roommate.  I held it out to her with pride, “Look what I made in class.”  And the happy little smoker that she is replied, “Oh, is it an ashtray?”  “No! It’s my cup of suffering!” “Oh . . . it looks like an ashtray.”  “It’s a tear cup!” “I could rest my cigarette right here.”  She made a motion to rest an imaginary cigarette in the lip of the little bowl.  I snatched it away dramatically and held it to my chest.  My poor little pot! I was horrified at the thought of it being used for so crass a thing.  I teased my roommate for being so unflinching in her insensitivity. We laughed.  I told her I was going to find someone to fire it so that I could glaze it at The Clay Room.  “Can I have it for an ashtray?!”  “No!” 

            The next week I laughed with my classmates about this story and I reflected on it again when I blogged about it for our class experience blog.  Half way through my blog God said, “Yes, that thing is an ashtray.  You are not.” I fell quiet inside again as I realized that I had in fact made myself into an ashtray.  My life had gone something like this: “You are an ashtray.” I’m an ashtray? “You’re an ashtray.”  I’m an ashtray. “That’s right you’re an ashtray. Hold this.” Yes, I am an ashtray. Snuff out your anger in my palms. Pile the butts of your burnt out hopes in my hands. I’m built for ashes.  Not for water.  Not for earth.  Only for ashes. “You’re an ashtray.” I’m an ashtray.

           But God says—“No. You are not.” And I say—“No. I am not. That thing. That clay thing. That is an ashtray. I am not.  You may place your ashes there. I do not hold ashes. I do not hold fears. I am not an ashtray.” 

           Maybe I’ll let my roommate use my little pot as an ashtray . . . for a while anyway.  I have a feeling it has more to say to me and I’m always hesitant to dispense with a good conversation partner.