Mothballs, Bowling Balls, Juggling Balls, and Portmanteaux

And my polyester confession

Helen Wilson Wantz died at the age of 104. She was born, lived, married, had children, and died in Orchard, Nebraska, which certainly merits consideration for the Dorothy Award from The Wizard of Oz. “There’s no place like home” is the lesson learned, which in mythic structure is called The Return With the Elixir, where the hero returns from the Dark World carrying something that will be a value to the community.

By the way, there is no truth to the rumor that a myth is a female moth.

I wonder about moths, they are built out of dust, for if one is whacked with a fly swatter little particles fly around. Not that I have anything against moths, you understand, except for their proclivity to eat clothes. I remember the smell of mothballs in my grandmother’s closet. Whatever happened to mothballs? Have they just gone out of fashion? For things do fall out of fashion, as we all know, things like polyester suits, which I am embarrassed to say I once sported in a disco. It was the era of Saturday Night Fever, but I’m happy to report that phase lasted only a few weeks in my life. Good thing, too. I don’t think my future wife would have been attracted to me in one of those outfits, approaching her and saying, “Are you Jamaican? ’Cause jamaican me crazy.” Or, “I’m here. What were your other two wishes?”

Disco dances had certain moves (e.g., “The Hustle”) but I never took dance lessons because I figured if I could not dance like Fred Astaire, even after years of practice, what was the point? Some are born to dance, others are born to watch people dance, and some are born to bowl, which is what Helen Wilson Wantz did for 50 years on the Bank of Orchard bowling team.

Bowling was a frequent communal experience when I was a kid. We had two bowling alleys near my home, the Woodlake Bowl and the Corbin Bowl, and yes, once, only once, I tried a prank phone call, asking the fellow who answered, “Do you have fifteen pound balls?” He said, “Son, that’s been around for fifty years” and hung up.

Some prankster. In the 1960s there was a group of LSD-laced hippies called “The Merry Pranksters.” It was started by the novelist Ken Kesey, who wrote two great books—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion—and then nothing further of note, as he took to traveling around in a Day-Glo bus with a destination sign on the front that said Further. A few years earlier Kesey had volunteered to be a guinea pig in a secret CIA study of the effect of psychoactive drugs on humans. Sheesh! He became a high (ahem) prophet for dropping acid, and brought along many with him, but all that prankster bus contributed to the world was smog.

Smog, by the way, is a portmanteau. That’s a blended word made of partials from two other words, like motel (motor hotel) and brunch (breakfast and lunch. Why not linner?) or gerrymander, named for a Founding Father named Elbridge Gerry who brought in the idea of redistricting, which on a map looked like a salamander in a yoga class. (Thank goodness we’ve outgrown all that!)

Lewis Carroll was fond of the portmanteaus. The poem “Jabberwocky” begins:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty, discussing the poem with Alice, informs her that the word slithy is a portmanteau of lithe and slimy. The book also gives us that most useful and descriptive word chortle, a combo of chuckle and snort.

When I was in third grade our teacher asked us to come up with portmanteaux (the plural of portmanteau, and doesn’t that make me sound like a school, which is scholar + fool)? I came up with two: stumb and midiot. Stumb combines stupid and dumb. Midiot is moron and idiot. Why was I so anxious to use the glorious English language to come up with slang insults? It had to be because of Stevie the Bully, who I and most other boys were scared of. He once pushed me into the sinks in the bathroom and it gave me a righteous bruise on my hip. He threw that foamy soap they had in those days into the eyes of one of my friends, a little guy named Terry, and made him cry. I was afraid of Stevie and never would have called him a stumb midiot to his face. But nature exacted my revenge, for I grew into a 6’3” basketball player, while Stevie didn’t grow much at all, and by the end of junior high I was no longer afraid of him.

Humpty Dumpty was played by W. C. Fields in the 1933 film Alice in Wonderland, which seems like perfect casting.

W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty

Cary Grant was in it, too, as the Mock Turtle. Gary Cooper was a knight. And the White Rabbit was played by Skeets Gallagher, who most people have never heard of, but should, because you don’t come across many folks named Skeets these days.

Before the movies, Fields was a legendary vaudeville juggler. You can see how good he was in this clip from The Old Fashioned Way:

I can juggle three items such as balls, beanbags, or lemons, but there are some things that should never be juggled, like lovers or hand grenades. Only a stumb midiot would try to do that.