My childhood certainly wasn’t a non-stop joyride. Yet countless joys were ridden and relished, especially during those years between about age six and eleven when we are old enough to express our joys excitedly but young enough not to worry that too much enthusiasm might be viewed by our peers as babyish, with no sense of detached cool.
I still remember my first realization that, concerning my classmates, I was not the adorable paragon that I seemed to be within my family. We were all on the playground at Delaware Trails Elementary School when a couple of boys ran by me and, looking back, gleefully delivered some appalling news about my medical condition.
Little did they or I know that they were diagnosing me with a malady first named during World War I on the battlefields of France. Those poor soldiers had to put up with the disgusting lice that proliferated in the trenches where they were stationed. Any guesses as to what the Brits named those parasites that live on human skin? They wanted a word that sounded vaguely French, vaguely ridiculous, and vaguely nasty. They certainly achieved all three goals when they dubbed them: COOTIES!
And now, two of my smart-aleck third-grade classmates were announcing on the run to all standing near me that I, too, was infested and should be avoided at all costs.
Ah, cooties. Who of us as children didn’t engage in that silly, shrieking tag game, either inflicting the imaginary pests on others or desperately trying to purge ourselves of them when they were inflicted on us. Do you remember that the most likely way to get an infestation was when you were seen in the company of a peer of the opposite sex? How ironic was it that only a few years later, when we were sitting in gender-segregated sex education class, we were firmly told to be careful when we started dating or we might end up with one of any number of transmitted diseases — from the opposite sex — that would be as real to us as cooties had been imaginary.
Even in third grade, we kids were quite creative with this game. We had heard of (or perhaps even invented) a cooties vaccination. I remember a friend taking his retractable pen and clicking it onto my shoulder while chanting: “Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your cooties shot.” Yes, this friend did become a doctor. I bet it was no coincidence that this occurred around the year 1956, when the polio vaccine became ubiquitous and we were some of the first children to receive it. We were all too familiar with the scary real experience of vaccination and so, as kids have been doing forever, attempted to diminish the fear by mimicking real life with make-believe games in order to play out such insecurities.
What I also remember is that when I was in junior high school there was a girl, a few grades behind me, who was terribly overweight. Henry Mancini’s instrumental “Baby Elephant Walk” was playing on all the radio stations, and when she would be in the halls passing between classes, the meanest boys in the school would quietly whistle that tune as she went by. Imaginary cooties was just a game; this was torture for her, I’m sure.
Today, we’d use the term “body shaming,” but back then we simply wrote it off as “being picked on”; a rite of passage. But this poor girl was being verbally — well, musically — abused. I wish I would have had the courage back then to stand up for her, either by telling those bullies how pathetic I found their hurtful behavior or by befriending her. I did neither. I made the comfortable choice of doing nothing and therefore not risking being bullied myself.
Now I know that we can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we cannot choose both. We already live in most uncomfortable times. Perhaps courage in our day-to-day interactions with others might just be the best antidote to conquering the infestation of imaginary cooties we see all around us and, if we’re honest, gnawing at us as well.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here