A Tape Worm Teaching Moment...

In 1956, when I was 8 years old, I found myself sitting in one of my favorite places on earth, the front room of my distant great cousin, Alice Clark. A tough old Southern,Virginia, can-do kind of woman, who had buried multiple husbands and survived cancer’s best efforts to kill her. She smoked unfiltered Camels, end to end, and was wrinkled way beyond what would be expected of her 50 plus years.

Alice looked like a dark brown apple doll from Stuckey's. Ninety-eight pounds of sinew and bone, Iggy Pop in a fading house-dress.  Her voice deep, gargled in nicotine and framed by brown stained teeth interspersed with white porcelain caps.

Our mutual attention turned to the dachshund sleeping soundly to my left. Alice raised them, pups from her pups, Conversation stopped as we both focused on a glistening tapeworm segment undulating its way out of the anus of that particular dog as he lay pressed into the cushions next to me.

Bright sunshine cut like a laser through the wooden slats of her front window, slicing cleanly through drifting clouds of cigarette smoke, spotlighting our knees and that anus escapee, moist from crawling through the bowels of prison as he made his move for freedom.  

Alice got impatient, she wasn’t good at waiting for anything. Holding a smoking Camel in her left hand, she reached across my lap with her right and grabbed that tapeworm with her thumb and forefinger, pulling it free of the puckered sphincter and carrying it swiftly to the ashtray on the crowded coffee table at our knees.

There, she promptly smashed it into goo with her bare thumb. Mushed into the cigarette ashes, one small glob still moving in slow motion, winding down.

Wiping her hand clean on the dog blanket that covered the whole couch, she said: “Damn worms!” as she once again took a long draw on her cigarette.

In that moment, my world became instantly wider and more interesting. I knew with greater certainty than ever before, that if one tough old Virginia woman could throw out the rule book of what I had been raised to believe ladies were capable of, and unflinchingly pull a worm out of the ass of her dog, squashing it into finality with her bare fingers like that, for me and my life, the possibilities were suddenly endless.

I knew I could face, and do anything.