Scales and Tales

“A pretty girl picks a flower. A bee returns to where the flower used to be, sees that it’s gone, gets mad, and stings a man with a red beard. The man with the red beard doesn’t look where he’s going and bumps into a lady in curlers holding two bags of groceries. The groceries fall all over the sidewalk and the man with the red beard and several friendly neighbors all help the lady in curlers pick everything up. Angeline might see everybody picking up the groceries and say, “Look, a pretty girl with a flower.” 

She was in balance with the whole. 

The whole is everything and everything is part of the whole. Before everybody’s born they are in balance with the whole. After they’re born, most people lose their balance. Angeline didn’t.”

I related so hard to Someday, Angeline as a kid because I related to any book about awkward only children with no friends and overactive imaginations. Back then, I thought I was in balance with the whole like Angeline was. Put me in a classroom with all of its social complexities and fresh starts and pencil shavings, and I would see the teacher preparing to shape young minds. But I was 9, and like most 9-year-olds, I was an egomaniac. I’m not the precocious child who sees a pretty girl with a flower setting off a chain of events -- I’m the bee who got pollen-blocked.  As I’m not so impulsive to waste my life stinging a ginger with groceries, I would probably have settled with thinking bad thoughts about that pretty girl, and hoped that they stung, somehow, because pretty girls get tons of flowers all of the time, and I just wanted the one. 

I – that is to say, Girl Me, not Bee Me –begun writing privately about how much all the other kids in the class sucked before it became cool to be a chick with a diary in the 80s. At first my diary entries were straight-up lists: I hate Bree. I hate Jackie. I HATE Melanie.  Eventually they became small, bitchy cries for justice, and I would like to think they mated in the land of the small and the bitchy, and eventually gave birth to Twitter, because I’m just one in a long line of bitches with nothing in the way of an authoritative presence and a need for attention. But I'm not bitter. I don't want revenge, anymore. I just want to sneak in and even the scales.