What a bewildering place the world can be! God knows they don’t give you a guidebook when you land on the planet. And who’d have time to read it anyway? You just get used to the kids in your neighborhood and suddenly you’re in kindergarten. And then as you’re getting those relationships sorted out, they start grading you on your behavior and your performance. You have to figure out so many things on the fly. And there’s no means to sit down with your friends over a root beer and talk things out. “Hey, does this nap time thing feel a little unnecessary to you?” On the one hand it seems natural to act on the desires coursing through your pre-school body. But no, you’ve got to learn to keep things in check, too. Discipline gets some of the job done. Peer pressure takes care of the rest.
Every child learns early on where gender boundaries are drawn. You want to fit in? You want to get through each day with a minimum of hassle? You want to avoid being one of the kids that all the other kids pick on? You figure out right quick what’s okay to show an interest in and what’s not. So being a boy with a fondness for girls’ shoes meant I was a boy who learned to keep things to himself. ‘Cause we’re not talking about liking the wrong sports team here. We’re not talking about being a kid who liked to read rather than play army. No, for me the topic of gender exploration had no meaningful vocabulary that I could work with when I was a child. And the corollary issue of coming to grips with my developing sense of the erotic didn’t have the slightest possibility of being fathomed. Simply put, there was something I liked, and that something put me at odds with the world as I found it. Not surprisingly, I opted to shut up about it.
Once at the age of eight or nine I was visiting my father’s parents in the moist, green hills of West Virginia. It was a coal mining community, and I’m sure I stuck out in that little town just down the highway from the Cochran Cemetery like the foreigner that I was. Spending most of my life up to that point in places like Texas and Alabama, I somehow sensed I was in an environment that was unique in my experience. The sloping yard of my grandparents’ home was covered in a carpet of soft clover. Bees hummed in the hydrangea bushes at the foot of the porch. Wasps daubed their nests in the eaves. And every evening I was delighted to find myself in a back yard made magical by myriads of lightning bugs. At night I would I entertain myself by capturing them in an empty peanut butter jar equipped with a lid that my father helped me punch holes in with an ice pick. It was a moment of wonder to be able to study these amazing creatures through the glass and marvel at their unearthly glow.
My delight was brought up short when into that natural paradise slithered a glistening length of pale skin the thickness of a garden hose. Keep in mind that I was a city kid for the most part. Dogs, cats, and the occasional pet turtle were the fauna I regularly came in contact with. Beyond that, my sense of wildlife originated in Dorling-Kindersley style picture books and a set of Baby Animal Lotto cards. This ignorance of the natural world was compounded by our family vacations spent roughing it with kerosene lanterns and a chemical toilet 30 minutes by dirt road from a two-lane black top highway in northwest Arkansas. In that pioneer-era existence, the world of nature was a thing to be kept at bay. Flies buzzed noisily through the summer heat. Horseflies would alight on bare skin for a snack. Before I would be turned loose to play and explore, I had to be doused liberally with Ticks-Off. But the things I learned to live in fear of the most were snakes. Driving up to our property, my father would leap out of our station wagon with his over-the-knee work boots on and strap a .22 pistol to his side. Then he’d mow through the tall grass swinging a weed cutter back and forth to clear a path to the fruit cellar we slept in, sidearm at the ready should he encounter any dangerous creatures that might be lurking in the undergrowth. He ran over a black snake once that I recall. And shot one on another occasion. Why, I’m not sure, since this particular species wasn’t dangerous to humans. But once when my mother and I went to town for groceries and ice, we came back to find a carcass of a rattlesnake my father had killed and positioned dangling from a tree. And every visit was punctuated with stern warnings that I should be on the lookout for water moccasins, another venomous snake frequently found in the region, a breed made all the more ominous by its penchant for submerging in still water with just its eyes above the surface.
Have I set the stage? Snakes = bad. Nature = something to be wary of. Let’s return to that luminous length of writhing black-spotted flesh I stumbled across during my West Virginia lightning bug safari. Of course, my grandparents would not have had me running around their property if poisonous serpents were something I might actually encounter. But I didn’t know that as a kid. All I knew was that I had come across something in the glow of my flashlight that reminded me of only one thing in my limited experience. I didn’t panic when I saw the thing slithering in the grass before me. I ran excitedly to my grandfather and brought him over to take a look. It turned out that what I’d encountered was nothing more than a humble slug.
It was a remarkable discovery. It was something new under the sun. My science loving neurons were all abuzz with the novelty of the experience. And I felt it was a moment of such revelatory uniqueness that I had to share it with others. In fact, I had the chance to do just that during that same visit. I had been invited by neighbor kids to attend a church picnic at the center of town. As we gathered around a picnic table to fill our plates with potato salad and hot dogs, I felt emboldened in the company of those strangers who were neighbors of my father’s people to tell my story of fright, relief, and discovery. “I thought it was a snake!”, I told them at the climax of my tale with much earnestness in my voice. But instead of being received with sympathy and understanding, the reaction was scoffing and ridicule. How could I confuse a slug with a snake? Insert comments of scorn and derision here. I already felt like an outsider there in that summer’s afternoon gathering I had crashed. But the teasing that ensued was more than I was equipped to deal with. Instead of joining with me and marveling at how a slug might seem like a snake in the dark of night to someone unfamiliar with them, they chose to taunt me about it. Over. And over. And over. I don’t remember what was said. I don’t remember the way it was said. I just remember reaching the point that it didn’t feel worth it to stay. And so on that bright and sunny July day, I left the gathering early and walked to my grandparents’ home by myself feeling completely shamed and ridiculed. I was bewildered. What had I said to invite such abuse? I had simply said something that was on my mind that made sense to me. And this was the way the community around me reacted. Unfortunately I was too young—and the internet too many years into the future—for me to sum up the experience with that ever so handy web shorthand of today: WTF?
But that’s not the end of the story. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I kept to myself the rest of that visit. Fortunately, I was a voracious reader, and when the world failed to entertain me in an appreciative fashion, I could easily look elsewhere. Mercifully my father and mother and I finally left town, and I immersed myself in other adventures and discoveries with my friends back home. A school year began. A birthday. Christmas. Winter gave way to spring. Easter. Summer vacation. And then we packed up the station wagon and went to see my grandparents again. At least I think it was a year later. It may have been two. The mind boggling thing, though, the utterly astounding, truly incomprehensible thing was that during my next visit to that small West Virginia town, as I was walking the two blocks to the nearby general store with a nickel in my hand for a bottle of pop, two older kids passed me walking the other direction and one of them immediately began deriding me for thinking a slug looked like a snake.
WTF???
In my own estimation, I’d say I was a pretty average kid. Let me tell you, I’ve been through 12 levels of public schooling. I know what the kids who got picked looked like and acted like. And I was not one of them. I had friends that liked me and seemed to genuinely enjoy my company. So this hazing at the hands of complete strangers was totally out of the realm of my experience. It was in a word: bizarre. But I tell you this tale to illuminate the point that began this chapter. I was a boy who liked things that other boys didn’t like. If sharing something as innocuous as mistaking an elongate serpent for an elongate gastropod could cause this much of an ongoing fuss, I was going to have to watch carefully what I said. It was a cautionary tale that vividly warned me about any future topics I might wish to bring up for general scrutiny. Say, like how much I enjoyed wearing girls’ shoes.
Yeah, that probably wouldn’t get me very far.
I won’t say that the experience drove my passions underground. But it was one of many events that shaped me into picking and choosing my battles carefully. I can tell you that nearly 50 years on from that strange small town encounter, I’ve come to prize and value the person that I am. But it was a consciously taken road that finally led me here. I recall my parents dropping me off for band camp at the beginning of my freshman year of college. My first night, alone in the dorm, I dressed myself up in a cool new V-neck sweater, and pair of windowpane bellbottomed jeans (sewn to look as though they were comprised of regularly space rectangular swatches of denim), and a prized pair of platform wood-soled sandals. I looked great. I loved those shoes—a men’s pair that were still plenty adventurous. What’s more, I was free to walk into a new future at a university where no one knew me and I was free to reinvent myself. I took a look in the mirror... and thought about the other young men I’d met on campus so far that day... and the regular jeans and T-shirts and trainers that they wore... and I quietly changed into something less uninhibited, and I went out to see if I could make some new friends.
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[On the feet here as I blog: not the shoes I started the day wearing, but the pair I had on when it ended, my Claudie faux fur lined clog booties from Zigi Soho. And at the other end of the "like seat", the Ryanne side zip studded bootie from Kork-Ease. It was purchased from one e-store on sale, but then we spotted the exact same shoe for half the price on eBay, so back to the original retailer it went.]
I read a fair assortment of blogs—none as regularly as ECHID*—so I feel comfortable with the assessment that bloggers generally share too much of themselves for my comfort. In fact, isn't it a blog cliche: many bloggers are hoping for their 15 minutes of fame by posting images of what they have on, where they went for a drink, and friends making silly faces for the phone?
One of my favorite things about ECHID is that you share your subject with alacrity and panache, and share just enough about yourself that we are connected to the subject matter on an equal footing (hee!) with the writer.
After years of following ECHID, I am ready to know more of your own story—through your passion for and knowledge about your subject, you have made me crave YOU—who is this person, whose experiences and pratfalls have wrought such a funny, insightful, skilled writer?
Lindsey, thank you for your constant generosity. I eagerly await the next chapter!
* No one else posts almost daily like you do, Lindsey.
Posted by: Melissa | 12/22/2012 at 11:11 AM
Wow! I didn't know you're a Guy!!!
Posted by: Judy | 12/22/2012 at 01:43 PM
Judy: Well, no one's perfect.
Posted by: Lindsey Cochran | 12/22/2012 at 04:09 PM
Ha ha! Yes, I agree. But maybe this blog is close to perfect, at least to me. You write about clogs and I am obsessed, so YAY! I love this blog and I love that you write it with savior faire. And it sounds like there's a love story a'comin and I love that too. One might say I'm full of love right now too. I'm getting married soon and I swear to DOC (thank you), I'm wearing clogs at my wedding!
Here's to the New Year!
Posted by: Judy | 12/22/2012 at 10:25 PM
Lindsey, I'm enjoying the story, but it is also reminds so much of my own growing up. I wasn't very interested either in playing with toy trucks or playing army, I was more interested in my little garden, or learning how to do crafts. But on the other hand I was completely fascinated with carpentry and anything that had to do with dirt and water. Today I design and administer public projects that involve just that.... dirt and water, with some asphalt, concrete, and steel thrown in for good measure. But nonetheless, much of what I love is really not the typical domain of the male gender. Case in point is my love of horses and in particular trick riding on them. Even though it's a high speed, truly dangerous sport/art, it's participants are 98% female. So I just shake my head and wonder, why wouldn't a typical macho type of guy be drawn to something like this....but they're not. So back to shoes, I too kept my passion pretty much a hidden thing for most of my life. In recent years though I'm far more inclined to let my fashion sense show itself, nonetheless with due regard to the environment and people I will be around.
But a love for great footwear may alter the course of someone else's life and that certainly is true in the case of my wife and her recent severe ankle injury. Had it not been for my grave concern that she could get stuck wearing nothing more than rocker bottom sneakers for the rest of her life, she could have been persuaded by well meaning, but nonetheless partially clueless surgeons, to undergo a surgical procedure that would have ultimately caused severe limitations in her footwear choices and would have also left her technically crippled. So while many people do not in any way "get" the shoe thing, in this case it is altering the course of someone's life, hopefully to a much better outcome than would have otherwise happened.
Posted by: Tracy | 12/22/2012 at 10:44 PM