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Sunday, July 12, 2020

Forbidden Subjects

There is a woman in Jakarta whom I regularly talk to and she seems to have a talent for awakening long past memories in me ('Long past?' asked Scrooge. 'No. Your past,' the ghost answered). Or maybe it's not her at all. Maybe as I get older (and older and older), I begin to dwell on the past, which seems, suddenly, to stand out as particularly significant against the day-to-day backdrop of the present. I don't know. These are things that had pretty much dropped out of memory, irrelevant and expendable. These are the many things that were and are no longer.

And I cannot say that they are important things. I remember, for instance, a time when the subject of menstrual periods and the existence of a product called Kotex were things that were simply not mentioned. In fact, they were forbidden. There was no such a thing as a Kotex commercial on TV. God forbid. One did not speak of such things. And because such things were not spoken of, we, as children, had no idea what they were. I remember walking with my little friends one fine day and coming upon a used feminine napkin someone had tossed on the street, perhaps out of a car window. We gathered around this thing in a circle, both curious and repelled. What could this possibly be? Something from the scene of a crime? A dead animal? And we poked with a stick just to be sure it was dead and would not suddenly jump up and either dash away or turn on us. We were perplexed, clueless, until another boy happened along. 'Oh, that's a bun wad," he said. Say whut? 'Ya, a bun wad. Women have to wear them on their butts. I don't know why.' Oh, gross.

Similarly, I had learned somewhere during the same time period, from a similarly worldly boy, that when you marry a girl, you have to put your penis in her butt. Say whut?! 'Ya, I don't know why. But you can't marry her unless you do it. Well dang, in that case, I ain't never gettin' married!

People back then were blissfully ignorant, right up until they began to learn 'the truth', at which point they were horrified and disillusioned. Because these subjects were not addressed, because they were improper and unspeakable, because there was no sex education in schools, there were many girls also who had no idea what was going on when their first period arrived. I remember being up in the woods with my family along with my cousins and their parents when Susan, my female cousin, suddenly started her first period. We were in the woods, as I've said, staying in two primitive cabins, with the only restroom facility being an outhouse, when suddenly this traumatic thing occurred. Susan was, apparently, bleeding to death. Or so she feared. One day she's fine, the next day she's bleeding to death. Apparently from her butt. There was a lot of hectic running around among the adults, whispering, Susan confined in the back room of her cabin, crying. 'She just has a very bad stomachache,' my mother said. 'She'll be fine in a couple of days.' A stomachache that makes you bleed? Yeah, that is bad. Poor Susan.

On the other hand, we new perfectly well about cigarettes. Not that they cause cancer (for no one knew that yet), but that they taste good, like a cigarette should. That was the Winston jingle. Or that people would walk a mile for a Camel. That Tareyton smokers would rather fight then switch! Unlike feminine napkins, we were thoroughly instructed in the usefulness and desirability of cigarettes (for adults, of course) right down to the ones most recommended by doctors (pictured in lab coats, lighting up behind their desks).

These are the things I remember. These and many more. And it is like describing an alien world I have been to, or an alternate dimension. It is, even to me, an alien world. And yet I feel pressed to describe it, to recount and remember it. Why, I wonder. Of what importance would this be to a young woman living in Jakarta? And how is it that my own world, the very world that grew me, seems immeasurably more foreign than this foreign land I currently reside in?

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