Looking Ridiculous and Loving (er, accepting) It

When I was five-years-old, I found in our basement a plastic holly wreath that my mother used at Christmas time. It was made to fit around a thick candle and, as it happened, fit quite nicely on the top of a five-year-old’s head. I was walking around with this wreath on my head, imagining that I was Julius Caesar wearing his crown of laurel leaves (yes, I was a nerd even then), when I had a thought, and acted on it before I even finished forming it completely. The thought was, “I wonder if I can get my head completely through this?”

I could. It is a curious property of plastic holly wreaths, however, that they do not come off nearly as easily as they go on. When I tried to pull the wreath up again, the plastic holly leaves pricked me. I pulled harder. They gouged me. Then I wondered if I would get in trouble for putting one of Mom’s decorations where it obviously did not belong. My panic mounted, and I no longer cared if I would get in trouble or not. I wanted this painful thing off.

My mother and father and my older brother were in the dining room when I walked in. They suddenly saw a little girl, sobbing, with a truly ridiculous ornament around her neck, tugging vainly at it crying, “I can’t get it off! I can’t get it off!”

They laughed. They laughed really hard. Of course. I would too, in their place. But it was the first conscious memory I have of being embarrassed. I knew that I had made myself ridiculous.

I recently read Richard Russo’s Straight Man, a humorous novel about Hank, the head of a literature department in a small state university. Each member of his department scrabbles for their own little bit of political power. At a high point in the tension, Hank, suddenly and uncontrollably relieved of an inability to pee, is hiding in the ceiling in urine-soaked pants, wondering whether he should eavesdrop on his colleagues as they debate removing him from the chairmanship. That’s where he drops my favorite quote from the book:

“Once dignity is surrendered, there are plenty of options.”

Yep. Just give up on that dignity and you can get the wreath pulled over your head (they worked towels between the prickly leaves and my skin and pulled it off). Thank you, Richard Russo. Now maybe I can give up enough to ask my mom-in-law how to hemstitch.