May 14

Fuzzy Wuzzy, surprisingly, was a milder shade of pink than I was expecting, and while its name conjured up images colorful crayons (it was indeed a Crayola color), it has a surprisingly troublesome history.

The phrase was purportedly a derogatory term for a black person, used in the 19th century by British colonial soldiers to describe members of an East African nomadic tribe, the Hadendoa. It came from Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballad poems, published in 1892, and was meant to express admiration, rather contempt – it was considered innocent and commonplace enough to include in a playground tongue twister (though “Ring Around the Rosy” also derives from dark origins, so there is that).

Unlearning has always been more difficult than learning. Today was the first day I felt shame about my fingers. I was teaching harp, hooking my thumbs around a wire string to show my student how to keep the round pocket of space between her thumb and index fingers when she plucked. “Your thumbs!”

“I know.” They were bad, really bad, but not bad enough to need a band-aid. Raw, red, and almost, but not quite bleeding. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’ve gone through a jumbo box of Walmart band-aids in a quarter.

look: Gary Parker, Rock Applause
listen: Book of Mormon, Hello
read: Aja Couchois Duncan, From “Fictive…”