Wasp Sting Thing

Wasp Sting Thing

An actual story happened to me! This is a belated telling, but here we are.

The story I’m alluding to happened in the middle of a writing exercise, so I have it down verbatim.

It’s hard to believe this, but it’s true. I was introducing the junkyard list activity in my Narrative Forms class. This is an exercise that I borrowed from my pal Amber Bacon and adapted. I’m pretty sure she adapted it from something Elizabeth McCracken does.

First, to get them started, I show them a picture of a junkyard. Like this one by Jake Johnson courtesy of Unsplash:

Then I tell them I’m going to set a timer for 3-minutes. You can try it at home if you want, it’s fun. I do all the writing activities I teach with my students to make sure they’re not boring. So, we’re all different, but it shouldn’t be terrible. Set your timer if you want to play along!

During the 3-minutes, I tell them, list responses to as many as you can of the following prompts:

o A recurring memory

o An image or object you noticed today

o A phobia or fear you deal with

o A photo from childhood you return to

o A place you visited that captured your imagination

o A new fact or thought you can’t get out of your head lately

o Your last text message

Ready set go!

So I did this with my students.

Here’s what I wrote down:

- Wasp sting

- Lady in red glasses

- Everyone dying

- Me sleeping

- Patch near the mall

Hardly anything! I was creeping along like a turtle. The timer chimed.

None of us finished, but that’s okay, this is our junkyard haul. Whatever we’ve got, we’ll repurpose to build something from the rusty parts. And that’s what I start explaining, how we’ll weld items from our list together like they’re pipes and hub caps. From them we’ll construct a short lyrical essay. We’ll see what connections we can make from this collection of finds.

Specifically I’m saying, “See, here’s my list. Wasp sting,” I read out loud. “Lady in red glasses.” I wonder aloud how these items might go together. Then I say, “Your present tense I should be there too,” but I can see everyone’s eyes, presently, are moving away from me and toward the left side of the room where two students with identical flower names sit. Rose and Rose, we’ll call them.

I follow the classroom of drifting eyes and see that the reason the eyes are moving toward Rose and Rose is that there’s a wasp in the room. It’s flying from the front of the class where I’m standing, toward the Roses.

I watch, as transfixed as everyone else as the wasp chooses its Rose. It plops down on the back of her shirt. The other Rose is laughing but springs into action. The whole class freaks out, people are standing up now and shouting, but Rose is being a badass about the wasp on her while the other Rose continues to laugh at the afflicted Rose. Still, Rose helps Rose, she gently swats, shakes the shirt. She’s trying to remove the wasp without angering it, but the wasp finds this shaking perfectly comfortable.

I want to pause here to say we are in a windowless, interior room of a big building on a busy city block in mid-autumn. And a wasp is in the classroom.

The shirt shaking isn’t working. This wasp is resolute.

I’m not doing a great job of knowing what to do. I try to get to wasp-Rose, but there’s only a thin layer of aisle and laughing-Rose and another student, we’ll call them Bill, are in front of the Roses. Plus a whiteboard. Plus wasp.

All students are on their feet now, spectating, shouting instructions. We may as well be at a boxing match.

Bill decides to step in. He grabs a copy of Animal Farm and nears the little creature with the pages like wings. It’s a dubious idea, but none of us have a better one, really. So Bill goes to trap the wasp in between the pages of the book. The wasp is too smart for this. Sees it coming. Rattled, it scooches onto Rose’s shoulder and stings her, then hides in her hair.

Reader, I wrote wasp sting at the top of a page. Then a wasp appeared in my classroom and stung someone.

*

Reader, I’m only calling you Reader, because we had just read The Crane Wife by C. J. Hauser and they call the reader, Reader, and the class enjoyed this. Though we all realized it was optimistic nomenclature.

Let’s pause for a flashback, Dear Skimmer.

*

The wasp sting I was remembering was not my own wasp sting, though I have two of those memories. Once, when I was a child, I stepped on my bike pedal and a wasp was hiding out there and stung my foot. Another time when I was in grad school in Alabama, I stepped out of bed and onto a wasp and my other foot was stung.

But the wasp sting I was remembering was not my own. It was my little brother’s. We were at the beach. I was maybe nine and he was maybe four. We were small and the adults were partying, so we were left to our own devices. It was the 80’s so no one helicoptered. Quite the opposite, they shooed. There was a scary energy in the air, I remember, like something bad was going to happen. And then my brother was stung by a wasp right in his nipple. Immediately, the party was over. The sandcastle he worked so hard on was abandoned. He was screaming and red and swelling up. It was all so upsetting.

My sister pointed out when I told her this, I clearly have a wasp sting thing.

*

Okay back to Rose and her reddening lump. Somehow, she finally shakes the wasp out of her hair. It flies back toward me, toward the front of the room. All of us are watching it, but somehow it disappears. We assume it’s gone behind the flatscreen at the front of the room where we show our slides and videos.

I’m trying to get the class back together but it’s not working. They’re still up and rowdy and nervous. I ask if anyone is allergic, and there is one student who is, and I tell them to go outside, trying to regain my professorial role, which has so easily flown away. Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be in charge.

When I’m sort of in charge again, I can clearly see that no one is going to be able to concentrate in the wasp room. So I decide we should hold the rest of class outside. The students are amenable to this. It’s cold but sunny out and there’s a new little park by the front parking lot.

As they pack up, I comfort them. “The wasp is more terrified of you than you are of the wasp,” I say. As I say this, I feel something tickling my arm. I lift it.

My students’ eyes confirm it. Their mouths are frowning almost comically, some are opening. The wasp is crawling across my arm.

Everyone freaks out again. But like Rose, I stay stoic. This creature is calming, for a wasp. (Or as they said when I read this to my students and asked for their permission to post it, our only choice when presented with a wasp is to be calm.)

Okay, I say, out loud or quiet, I don’t know, It’s okay, Wasp. I’m going to get you outside. I focus on becoming a soothing landing place. I don’t make eye contact with anyone, I keep my arm raised and beeline for the door of the classroom. The students are dodging this way and that, parting like clouds, but I ignore them. As much as I don’t want the wasp on me, I don’t want it to land on one of them, so I continue saying kind things to the wasp as I exit, then walk down the long hall with it crawling on me the whole time.

I believe unconsciously but wholeheartedly that when I finally get outside it will feel the breeze and go. But no. I open the door and it continues to take leisurely strolls on my forearm. I’ve become too comfy! I’m like Rose! This wasp will not go.

The allergic student walks up to me. “I have the wasp!” I say, warding them. I’m holding my arm aloft. Bent, like it’s broken.

Now here the wasp is with the allergic student. Great.

The student backs up, crosses the park. I am again not doing a great job of knowing what to do.

Finally, a scraggly ass bush in my peripheral vision comes to my rescue. It takes a couple of rubs, but I manage to wipe the wasp onto a bush leaf without getting stung. It’s difficult to lean into the leaves with the wasp on my arm and reminds me of the time my shirt caught on fire, and I had to stop, drop, and roll. I had to go toward the fire, rather than away.

It’s extremely counter intuitive. Similar to anxiety. Go toward it and it retreats, skitter around dodging it and it becomes worked up.

In class my students wanted to hear the story of the time my shirt caught on fire, but I didn’t tell them because it’s embarrassing.

For your eyes only, here it is. I’d been doing a performance art piece through Chashama theatre. It was my friend’s piece, but my job a a performer was to hand pamphlets to people in the street and speak to them for as long as I could hold their attention using only the words of George W. Bush Jr.’s inaugural address.

It’s a rainy and cold night and I talk to passersby for hours. So when I finally get home, I put on a pot of tea to warm up. I see the steam coming up and my neck feels stiff from hunching against the chilly weather. I naively decide to lean over the pot for a little innocent steam bath, thinking it will loosen my neck muscles. And as I do, it’s feeling good, but I hear this sound: Wah.

Then I’m burning. I’m fully on fire. My shirt! My hair!

I jumped around crazed. Then I remembered “stop, drop, and roll.” With much difficulty, I did stop myself and crouch down and “drop,” which meant laying down directly on top of fire. It wasn’t easy to do that. The flame went out, but I did roll, which meant wiggling like I was making a snow angel on the kitchen tile. And it finally stopped burning at all.

The whole back of my shirt was singed away. My bra too. I was red, but a roommate slathered me in salve and it turned out alright. My roommates pinned the burned shirt with its enormous hole on our living room wall. So there was a period where I told this story over and over at parties.

I’m sorry if you knew me then and you’re having to listen to this again!

*

Okay, back to our wasp. It looks more like a bee to me now that I’m close to it on the bush leaf. I couldn’t look at it while it was on my arm. But my students have filed out the double doors of the school now and are looking at it over my shoulder and they’re certain it’s a wasp. They tend to know these things.

They’re now all around me and the wasp bush. The whole class is now again with the wasp. We are all again at a boxing match. The wasp is winning every round.

I corral my knowledgeable students back inside and they’re bummed.

“We can’t have class with the wasp,” I tell them, and they mournfully accept this logic.

Back in the classroom, I’m determined to get us back to the writing, partly because I want to write all this down exactly. But first I show them my junkyard list and how it says “wasp sting” at the top, because seeing it there on the table I again feel like I’ve wandered into a dream.

I had already told them my list said “wasp sting” when I was setting them up for the exercise, but now I know they weren’t really listening to me. Because when they see my paper with the words right at the top, they all start shouting again.

“You manifested this!”

“You pulled this wasp into the material world!”

I’m not sure beings can be pulled into worlds I tell them, but I like the idea of being some kind of wasp wizard, so I repeat their declarations when I tell the story. I’m telling this story from the classroom itself because we’ve finally sat down to write. (Though now I’m retyping it and selecting better verbs.)

I tell the story again in my next class and the whole room bursts into applause. I guess for hearing a story in a class about stories. Or maybe for not having to do any work for a few minutes. Maybe for the wasp, a pollinator, and its unlikely escape. For Rose, who didn’t have any adverse reaction and won the respect and admiration of the whole class, and now a second class. Or for wasp wizardry. Witchcraft. The slight possibility of time warps or minute predictive spidey senses. Or whatever can explain writing “wasp sting” and then immediately seeing a wasp sting in a classroom environment, which we agree is nothing. Nothing explains it. Even good old coincidence falls short.

I had been having anxiety all that week, but this experience ripped me out of my egocentric predicament, like the story about Giacometti getting his foot run over by a car in front of the Joan of Arc statue in the Place des Pyramides. “Something has happened to me at last,” Giacometti said about the foot. This story has much complex significance to me, but at its heart it’s about how what shocks us, delays us, impedes us can stay with us and keep shaping our whole artistic lives.

I told Yasu about the intruding wasp and it had the same anxiety diminishing effect on him. I told my therapist, and she liked it too.

In the therapy session, we focused less on the wonder I hope hearing the wasp story restores in you too, and more on how trapped I’ve been feeling lately. How the way out of the trap is often right inside the trap.

Specifically, I was remembering this time when I was little and gave my cat to my best friend because she wanted it, but then I unexpectedly mourned in my first excruciating heartbreak. It went on for weeks, the mourning. Months. I was wondering about what other ways I “give away the cat” in my life. When do I value other people’s desires and needs so much that I forget I have my own? Teaching can be like this. Writing can even be like this. Women are trained to be like this in their relationships.

I was finding all these examples of my own self erasure and getting very upset, thinking I have to change everything I’m doing, that I’ve been doing it all wrong. But in the middle of the overwhelm, a wiser part of myself was like, “How about you just protect what is sacred to you moment by moment?” My system calmed down at that idea.

So now I’m asking myself this question as often as I can remember to. Literally. I’m asking myself what is sacred to me right now, right now! It’s this, reaching out. To you. You who are mostly old friends and a few new ones that may not even have time to read this, but if you do, hello! It’s also stopping writing this and going to eat because I’m hungry now. Okay, did, I’m back. It feels like asking that question makes me a better home for myself, and then maybe I will be for others as a bonus. A soothing arm. A real scraggly bush of a person! Which is I guess what I want to be.

I wish you get to be a real scraggly bush of a person. A place to land. And I wish you the witchcraft of protection. The badassery of roses. The sacred, springing out of nowhere. Refusing any explanation at all.

Love your way.

Xoxox