NANNY’S LITTLE ELEPHANT MAN

Mom sometimes talked about when she’d proudly

promenade me down the sidewalk in my little pram

(the only float in a one-little-man parade) how

Nanny would bunch the blankets up all around my

Humpty Dumpty head, leaving only a cherubic face

exposed, like the top of a tempting but imperfect cordial

nestled in a pleated, open-topped paper wrapper…because

conformity iron-ruled our twentieth century middle class

values back then, any hint of deviance (a.k.a. peculiarity)

threatening to upset the applecart of the much sought after

white-picket-fence American Dream of Perfection might

elicit frowns perhaps, or a tendency to look askance from the

unspoken discomfort of viewing a slightly misshapen head

on an otherwise miracle of perfection lying there

me, too ingenuous to realize amid the cooings and the oh isn’t

he cutes that I was, in fact, Nanny’s little elephant man—and a

head like that is an unsettling cross to bear, so Nanny

would go to work on me in the same way some shyster of a

used car salesman might shine and polish up the worst clunker

on the lot… eventually Mom breaks down and gives me the

low-down on my interrupted journey, lodged in the birth canal

the old forceps coming out of the operating room drawer to tug

and taffy-pull my skull (a blimp now with bruise-tattoo forceps

marks on the temples) head first out into the blinding lights

but when she sees that that explanation bombs at cheering me

up, she consoles me with a biology Ted Talk on how it’s such

a common thing, nothing to be ashamed of… that everyone

knows a newborn’s head is as pliable at birth as a glass-blower’s

bottle and hey, they just naturally pop back into shape and

harden later on (oh, yay!) but see… years later I go out for

high school football and, whoa! none of the helmets fit me, so

Coach has the team pig-pile me and screw a too small helmet

down around my skull, leaving me pop-eyed with puckered fish-lips…

and OK, much later when I enlist in the National Guard, it turns out

that those spiffy, round, black-visored formal dress caps aren’t right for

my E.T. head either… and in fact (pop!) would launch  themselves airborne after

a few minutes of wearing … so OK now, much much later I go badass biker

but biker helmets don’t fit either and, jeez, I can’t even manage to get a

damn doo-rag tied all the way around my head, so I ride helmetless…

at long last though, I drop the macho macho man scene and become the

gentle bohemian poet without the beret that (duh!) doesn’t sit quite right… BUT

hah! finally (and fortunately) I’ve discovered the great all–American soft baseball cap

so yeah, I’m good now, I’ve gotten on with my life despite that somewhat

extraterrestrial je ne c’est quoi about me… Anyway, I guess you’ll find me a little more

hard-headed these days,

still a little thin-skinned

and… in the opinion of

some, just a little prone

to wild exaggeration…