You Didn't Have Me At Hello*: Or How To Beg In

My feet itch! It’s not a fungus or anything mangy like that; it’s bites. Monday, I had come home from teaching and picking up the kids, and I felt something bite my left thigh. I ran upstairs and took off my pants. Something had bitten me, all right—from my foot to my stomach. I was covered with tiny, single-fang imprints from some tiny, single-fanged thing.

You’re still here, aren’t you? Of course you are. And even if I had announced that I had foot fungus or a yeast infection or something equally unsavory, you’d still be here.

I recently collected 34 essays from my two writing classes. Students were instructed to write about something that has had longevity in their lives. Essentially, I wanted to know what thing they liked so much that they kept it around or what thing they detested but couldn’t discard. You can get pretty fired up about that extra toe you’ve been carrying around for twenty-two years or the shrunken head passed down to you from a great Indian warrior chief.

Most of my students, however, started their essays with a declaration of their love for sports or boats or photography or running. And I never felt the love. Their exuberance didn't rub off. Their words did no happy dance.

Gabrielle Hamilton, in “Killing Dinner,” wrote, “It’s quite something to go barehanded up through a chicken’s ass and dislodge its warm guts.” What planet are you on that you’re going to put that story down? It’s the visual equivalent of an earworm! Even if you're some squeamish girlie girl, that hook is going to be stuck in your eye all day anyway; you won't shake that image. So you might as well read on about suckling pigs and the tongues of goats. (You know that if you turn off “Kung Foo Fighting” right after the intro, that riff will jangle your nerves worse.)

Ten years ago, when my husband was going through his midlife crisis (ladies and gentleman, we all know what this means: motorcycle jones), I bought him a book called, The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles, by Melissa Holbrook Pierson. I hated bikes—I'd already lost a friend to a crash—so I was an antagonistic, arm-folding hog hater. My plan was to buy the book and hope my husband would be satisfied reading about motorcycles and not have to ride one. I flipped through it at the bookstore and couldn’t put it down, so I wound up reading the whole thing before I wrapped it.

Did I want to go out and buy a motorcycle or even ride one? No. But the book made me feel exactly “what it is about motorcycles” that makes others want to do it.

When you start your blog essays or your papers or your letters (especially those love letters to me), you have to know that I have countless others (especially the love letters) vying for my attention. You cannot get me with hello!

I posted a self-portrait on flickr once to show that I had awakened with a slew of new gray hairs. The comments poured in, and we wound up on the subject of foot fungus. Someone commented, “wow, you had me at hello.... lost me at foot fungus :(.”

I not only get you with foot fungus, I grab you by the huevos. Why does it work when I do it? I'm a long-haired, mildly-attractive, not-too-old woman, and you don't expect it. Would it work with you? Of course not. It's been done. Get your own intro.

And now it's time to go and soothe my itchy feet.

Goodbye.**

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*Unless you are Bob Schneider, in which case you have me before you've said anything.

**Now you could have me with goodbye!