on monday my friend lawrence wore a wool, button-up cardigan with beavers all over it to class.
i laughed fit to bust, but couldn’t explain to him why.
it is international woman’s month, which could excuse my logic. but cannot excuse my politics teacher saying the word ‘vagina’ so many times last night.
nor can it excuse his repeated stories about abuse in the phillipines under the marcos regime where he goes off on how his friends used to get their “testicles electrocuted” and his female friends were “forced to get naked and sit on blocks of ice in front of generals”. while he, on the other hand, was the grandson of a colonel and was always let go instead of being punished for throwing molotov cocktails thru the windows at the US embassy. is it really demonstrating if you know your testes are safe?
my vagina looks nothing like that.
For one summer only, I coached a swim team called the Beavers. There were phenomenal (and sadly, misplaced by me) t-shirts that boldly declared, “I’ve got Beaver Fever!”
I also had a special polo shirt, made by one of the moms. She had made a small beaver out of felt and sewn it on the left chest, where you’d see an alligator on a retro Izod shirt. The beaver was poorly cut out to begin with, but it got a lot worse when we won our first swim meet and I got pushed into the pool. The rest of the year, even kids on our team couldn’t tell what the tattered felt thing was supposed to be. It didn’t look like a dam-building aquatic mammal, but if you squinted your eyes just right, it did kind of look like a vagina.