Like most serious bloggers I am always reading the blogs of others. Lately I have tended to focus on those dealing with weighty matters of state, culture and society. But I also make sure to find time for the more esoteric and humorous and those focusing on the small things that are important because life matters. Here are some of my recent favorites:
I
don’t remember the first time I was allowed to chew gum. It’s one of
those milestones in life that nobody bothers to record. Your mother
might write down when you finally said a real word, or managed to tie
your own shoes, but there’s never any mention of the gum-chewing
accomplishment. And that’s a mystery, because it takes some skill, as
well as intelligence and concentration, to keep chomping away at
something and avoid swallowing it.
So how do we make the transition? On Thursday we’re too young to chew
gum, because there’s a danger that we might choke, and on Friday
everyone’s okay with it. Maybe the big people just stop paying
attention. Or maybe there’s some traumatic event going on, or it’s game
seven of the World Series, and it goes unnoticed that you have twelve
sticks of Juicy Fruit in your mouth.
We were never permitted to chew gum in school — in class or out on
the playground, and certainly never in church. I was once almost nabbed
by a priest, who asked if I was chewing gum in the confession booth, a
violation that would have seemed unthinkable if I hadn’t actually been
doing it. Chewing gum in God’s home was a sign of disrespect bordering
on blasphemy. You might as well have taken one of those new-fangled
magic markers and drawn fake eyeglasses on the statue of Saint Anthony.
So, I lied.
“No,
Father,” I answered, “I don’t even like it,” while deftly tucking the
forbidden Fruit Stripe gum into a far corner of my mouth. I had learned
this trick from an older boy, who was sure that sooner or later it would
help me stay out of serious trouble. It seemed to work, but then it
also created a sizable dilemma, because I immediately knew that lying to
the priest was a much bigger sin. There was no commandment that said,
Thou shalt not chew gum,
although you’d have thought otherwise, judging by the way everyone
tended to react to it. In fact, when the Old Testament was written, gum
didn’t exist yet. I suppose Moses could have slipped it in anyway, if
he’d wanted to, but it would’ve just confused everybody even more, kind
of like our third-grade response to
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
None of us had any idea what the word meant, but that didn’t stop us
from pretending that we did. Here’s the definition a classmate and I
concocted sometime in 1964: “It means you shouldn’t act like an adult before you are one, because
you end up doing things you aren’t supposed to do, and that’s called
adultery.”
According to historians, it was the ancient Greeks who invented chewing gum, which they called
mastiche.
This hideous resin, exuded from the bark of the mastic tree, was also
used to make varnish. I can’t imagine what that tasted like, but I also
wonder if it had some toxic chemical ingredient that entered the
bloodstream and made its way to the brain, causing an altered mental
state. This may explain why the Greeks spent so much of their lives
lounging around, sitting on boulders and watching plays outdoors during
lightning storms, or looking for hidden pictures in the night sky, or
asking if a goat really existed.
There wasn’t much to do in those days, and people were always
searching for something to chew on, just to help them stay awake during
chariot races and barbarian invasions. Over the centuries, they
discovered many suitable substances, but it was still mostly tree sap
and beeswax.
Then around 1860, someone figured out that they could make money selling
flavored
gum, and an industry was born. By the time I paid my first visit to a
candy store, bubble gum was being sold, two-for-a-penny and wrapped in
waxy comic strips that looked as though they’d been drawn underwater.
There were also bubble gum cigars, sacks of chewable gold nuggets, and
gum hidden inside lollipops. And, of course, gumball machines were
everywhere, like short tax collectors waiting to drain our pockets of
pennies and nickels. The flavor of gum lasted about ninety seconds, and
so we required more and more of the stuff to maintain the desired
effect.
I don’t know if it was the actual gum the
nuns objected to, or the way we chewed it. More than one teacher
described the sight as similar to watching cows eat. Not one of us had
ever been outside the Bronx, and so our familiarity with farm animals of
any type was limited. No doubt we’d all seen cows on television, but
had somehow failed to notice how they chewed. Anyway, the nuns
confiscated our gum on a regular basis, along with candy, baseball
cards, comic books, slingshots, and pea-shooters. Those items, and
others, were usually stashed deep inside our desks. Hardened gum could
be found adhered to the bottom of every chair and table in the school.
Most terrifying, though, was getting caught actively chewing in class
and being summoned to the front of the room. We would have to remove the
gum, still warm and sticky, and place it into the nun’s outstretched
hand, even as we withered under her scorching glare. All of the sisters
had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but it was still
hard to comprehend how they didn’t draw the line at wet chewing gum.
My earliest encounter with bubble gum
probably involved the brittle, pink, wafer-thin slab included in packs
of trading cards. Opening the pack and slipping the gum into the mouth
was a smooth and automatic motion that served to enhance the discovery
of a Mickey Mantle or Whitey Ford baseball card, which I guess was
something like the experience the ancient Greeks had when they
calculated the area of a circle, or when they contemplated the essence
of reality, all while popping in a fresh piece of bark.
I eventually graduated to sticks of gum, individually wrapped in
packs of five. Sometimes I would unwrap and remove one. Then I’d refold
the rectangle of aluminum foil, pressing it flat with my fingernail to
make it look new and unopened. I’d slide the foil back into the paper
sleeve, then offer it to an unsuspecting family member. I can’t tell you
how many times I pulled this trick on parents, aunts, uncles, and my
older brothers, and they never seemed to catch on. Always, they would
open the empty wrapper and be completely surprised that there was no gum
inside. It was pretty funny for the first few hundred times, but after a
while I began to worry that maybe my family wasn’t very smart.
Would Plato or Socrates have fallen for such nonsense? Did the early
Greeks even play tricks? Or were they too busy inventing geometry and
trying to figure out how to eat artichokes? Did they blow bubbles with
mastiche, and if so, did it get stuck in their beards? Did they ever
leave the gum in their pocket on laundry day, or find some in a jacket
they hadn’t worn since last spring? Did they have trouble throwing away a
chewed piece because it wouldn’t come off their fingers?
I
mostly wonder where it all began. Who was the first person to chew gum?
Those ancient people were careful about preserving historic events.
They could recount epic battles and long voyages. They could explain how
to find the third side of a right triangle, and the very meaning of
life. But no one bothered to remember that first mastiche chewer, just
as no one ever claimed to
be that person. Was his mother proud
of his accomplishment? Did anyone even recognize this important
milestone? Whoever he was, he changed the world. Maybe he was in school
at the time, or out on the playground. More likely, he was praying in
the Temple of Zeus, and had the gum tucked into a far corner of his
mouth. At least that’s what I prefer to believe.
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