Touchtown: don’t get upset. Touchtown isn’t related to football, or pedophelia. It’s what they called a children’s area at the Kansas City Zoo. The “touch” was the touch of scruffy goats and bushy sheep. The sound was that of bleating, and the look was of red capped gumball machines dispensing pellets of generic feed, intended for the eager mouths of the herd. What I don’t remember is the touching or the intensity of desire one had to know how many quarters were in a parent’s pocket, how many a parent was willing to part with, what a parent considered reasonable.
What I remember is the pumpkin. I thought it Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater.
I find no trace.
What I find is the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, or rather, her shoe, abandoned, offering self-guided tours.
While today’s children enjoy a flamingo-themed zipline and gentle touches of manta rays, what stood for child-attracting attractions in the late 1970s was a giant concrete shoe.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
Around 1784, the old woman actually whipped “their bums,” which I at first read as “their burns,” and imagined a deepening scene of abuse.
Just their bums.
I remember a pumpkin, being inside, and thinking of Jack Spratt, who could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean. I came from a lean family. There were plenty of things I didn’t like to eat.
I think there was no pumpkin. No pumpkin with a little side window carved in it. I think there was just the shoe, and I am misremembering. Remember when the new information of the world firehosed you? When the repetition of books was important because it gave your mind a moment to rest. I know what happens in this one.
I also misremembered that my mother never spanked me. As a high school teacher, I would have debates with students about corporal punishment. “I was never hit,” I would say. This was true except for the one time my dad slapped me across my face. At that moment, I had just hit my little sister in the head with a small glass bottle, and she was gushing blood like a fire hydrant turned on. She’s fine.
“Of course I spanked you,” my mom, former certified hippie, said. “When you were really little.”
“Oh,”I said.
The shoe? Inside a shoe? The smell! My mother had six younger brothers. She knew smell. Her mother knew smell. Her poor mother, my grandmother, who began life a prim only child and became captain of a shoeload of kids. My uncles have been athletic, and I can think of the stink of them now. Fondly, really, because I grew up with sisters, and we did not stink. Not like that. We kept our legs closed.
My dad went on a tear of forcing us to eat certain foods after the divorce. He won his power game, and this has led me to do such stupid things as stand in the door of my classroom refusing to move, even when an angry student is screaming in my face and shoving me. My dad felt it was important we eat such things as fish sticks, canned peas, and canned green beans. Now, the fish sticks were no problem for me. (Not so my sister, forced to make use of tidal waves of ketchup between pieces of white bread, shrouding the sticks.) Green beans and peas were a problem for me. The scent of an open can gags me. It took years before I would try a spicy sauteed Chinese green bean. Which is a shame.
Though food had never been a battle before, there came this time we would have to sit at the table until we ate enough fish sticks, peas, or green beans. My youngest sister, the third, is younger enough that she probably never had to do this. I remember sitting and sitting and sitting. As a professional outlaster of destructive behaviors in children, I look back and say, we were evenly matched. My dad can be extremely stubborn, untouchable by reason or emotion. But we had access to napkins.
And it was not a gulag. We could go to the bathroom. You could carry your disgusting food in your cheek, under your tongue, or in a napkin. Mom used cloth napkins, but Dad used paper ones. Get that right in the trash, baby. Then theatrically pretend to eat the food. Dad might be distracted. He does have other things going on. Single father to three girls, half the week, every week, until he remarries.
I watch magician David Blaine eat glass and regurgitate frogs, swallow swords, hold a whole gallon of water in his belly and then turn fountain. Necessity, mother of invention.
Many a thinker has thought, where did this verse come from? Who is the old woman, what’s her glitch, why does she turn to corporal punishment? Nothing compelling.
It’s just where she lives. It’s just the kids she had, pre-pill, and the method she chose, they lacking electronics to take away, She put them to bed.
Why there was a shoe, not a pumpkin, or maybe a pumpkin was there, or maybe a pumpkin was elsewhere, and in my memory, a short circuit, or maybe to me a shoe felt like a pumpkin, or we visited in October, the month of my birthday, so a memorable time. Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.
Going On 