Lend a hand and play the game

I'm in the middle of a crazy busy week -- four marathon days of facilitation followed by another half day of meetings on Thursday -- and this means tweaking designs in the evening and dealing with the flood of daily emails. So I was pecking away at my (shiny quack quack new keyboard!) in my jammies tonight, and in the corner of my screen, IMing with a friend.

This friend had a personal achievement in the world of intimacy (how's that for coyness?) this weekend. I said "you need a badge" and hauled out my store of ancient brownie badges. We rejected the broom, the skates, the dog, the palette, the wheelbarrow, the golden bar, the symbol for the Elf Six ("here we are the jolly elves -- think of others, not ourselves!") and finally landed on the golden hand as the appropriate emblem (snort).


"You were a good brownie!" said my friend, in awe at the list of images I was rejecting.

"Oh, these aren't my badges," I said. "I bought these on ebay. To make ceremonial markers for just this kind of occasion. I *lost* all my badges."

And once again I sank into resentment at the Injustice done to my idealistic, unironic little 8 year old brownie self, the one that liked to wear the uniform just so, revelled in the sense of Belonging in the 4th Rhine Valley Pack of Canadian Brownies on the military base in germany.

A prelapsarian world, that little paramilitary gang. So earnest I was, uttering with complete conviction the "promise to do my best, to do my duty to God, the Queen and my Country, to help other people every day, especially those at home." Making oatmeal and eggs for my father so I could get the cooking badge, hiking through the Black Forest and painstakingly collecting plants so I could get the Outdoor Explorer badge (little binoculars? a magnifying glass? can't remember), sweeping the kitchen and being generally Obedient to tick off the little accomplishments in my little book and work my way up the golden bar, golden ladder, golden HAND, and then FLY UP to guides with the little wings made of coat hangers and tulle!

My own Fall from Innocence, that Brownie Pack. A camp out weekend, in a little hostel in the woods, vats of macaroni and chemical-tasting cheese and all sorts of wholesome and satisfying activities. "You need to wear your feet pjs," had insisted my mother, "it will be cold." "NO ONE wears feet pjs," I said doubtfully. "They'll laugh at me." "No they won't," she said. "They WON'T," I reasoned silently, "they're BROWNIES. Brownies are KIND," a total sucker to the sticky world of bluebird Helpfulness in the Brownie Handbook. So I wore them, then after being lulled to sleep by our Snowy Owl serenading us with her guitar and Me and Bobby McGee, a fire drill in the middle of the night, me attempting to hide the feet in my jammies by pulling socks over them, then every. brownie. in. the. camp pointing and laughing at me.

Despite the crushing humiliation, I dogged on toward the badge acquisition, still determined to be a BETTER brownie than all those bitches -- not REAL brownies! -- who'd laughed at my jammies. By the time we came home from germany, I had 22 badges marching up my arm -- skating! housekeeping! reading! art! (more macaroni, dried this time) -- and was within a hair's breath of the grail of the Golden Hand. Had almost accomplished all there was to accomplish as a brownie.

Then back to Canada, and, with a thud, into a world of secularized brownies, no sheen of the paramilitary that infused the pack on the base. Brown Owl Mrs. Kondruk, a lump of a woman and a pale imitation of the crackle pop pantheon of the revered overseas Owls. The toadstool that we were supposed to dance around drooped, and Brown Owl pronounced thickly, "you can't keep those badges - how do I know you earned them -- how do I know you didn't just buy them from someone?"

A squint eyed skeptic that Mrs. Kondruk, and the last gasp of wide-eyed innocence for me. I quit, in disgust... until a post-script flirtation with Girl Guides a few years later. One weekend in a little exchange with a Girl Scout troop somewhere in Michigan, being singled out with my friend Rachael by the Coolest Girls in the group, my first brush with Rumours of Lesbianism. Corruption complete.

My ebay badges belonged to someone named Josie H, according to the little Brownie Record. Josie wasn't the keener I was, apparently, her checkmarks much more lackadaisacal. She *did* have a Prayer for Catholic Brownies that I somehow escaped, which concludes Help me this day to be like You; teach me to be brave in denying myself, and to be good, gentle, kind and brave. AMEN.

F gets quite exercised about religion of all kinds. framing it all as a virus we must be able to create an innoculation from. It seems pretty simple to me -- Brave Denial x Selfless Obedience/Individuality = Belonging. Yet so alluring, the skipping in unison around the toadstool -- "We're the brownies/here's our aim/lend a hand and play the game" . I should be grateful to those girls who laughed at my feet pjs and the cynical Mrs. K -- they disrupted the inevitable trajectory and saved me from a life of Missionary Zeal.