Two
of our granddaughters are just now on a fortnight’s school trip to China. (The only such trip I can remember from my own early schooling was a two-hour visit to the local water filtration plant. They called it Science.) In writing a note of
encouragement to twelve-year-old Lulu, Joan inquired whether she and her
sister Cora would be accompanied by Turkalee. Turkalee, a soft toy simulacrum of a turkey, has for many
years been Lulu’s most intimate friend—intimate, and of course imaginary. In the past I have been an
inadvertent eavesdropper on animated conversations between Lulu and
Turkalee. I don’t actually know
whether Turkalee is in China. They
are by now a somewhat odd couple, and their future is uncertain. Lulu is in the effervescent flush of
girlhood, but Turkalee is decrepit in the extreme, threadbare, limp-necked. But what a friend Turkalee has been!
Imaginary
friends are rather on my mind at the moment. They are such helpful extensions of the self. First, I read of the very useful new app, “Invisible Boyfriend,” which for only $24.99, will fill the aching e-voids in your life. Then, in reading of the denouement of the University of
Virginia rape-hoax episode fostered by Rolling Stone magazine, to which I devoted this page some three months ago, I had the startling apperçu that the whole thing must turn
upon a most rare species of the imaginary friend—viz., the imaginary rapist.
Jackie—aka “the victim” and “the survivor”—wanted to attract the sentimental
attentions of a fellow student, Mr. X.
She sought to animate Mr. X’s sluggish amatory response by making him
think he had an ardent upperclass competitor. As this person was entirely imaginary, and thus unlikely to
sue me, we need not call him “Mr. Y”.
We can call him, as Jackie at first did, “Haven Monahan,” or as she
later did, when he supposedly orchestrated her brutal gang rape, “Drew”. Jackie did her best to overcome
the inconvenience of Haven Monahan’s actual non-existence by providing him with
some baroque means of electronic communication available for a small fee in the
cybernetic wilderness. Of course
she had to write the actual texts herself, but that's no hill for a stepper.
The role of Haven Monahan was to set the cat among the
pigeons, though I learn that in millennial-speak the cat has been replaced by
the catfish. I quote from
the indispensable on-line Urban
Dictionary. “A catfish is
someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social
media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online
romances”. (The Urban Dictionary is better at definitions than at grammar.) In case you need to use
the word in its verbal sense in a sentence, the urban lexicographers usefully provide an example: Did you hear how Dave
got totally catfished last month?! The fox he thought he was talking to turned
out to be a pervy guy from San Diego!
Totally? And from San
Diego! My God! No wonder so many of us from time to
time feel that the world would be a better place if we could control both
halves of our daily communications.
I am no longer embarrassed when--as happens with increasing frequency--I am discovered mumbling to myself. I simply explain that I find it
increasingly difficult to get a good conversation going. A popular song of my youth—and research reveals that it
actually antedates my birth—summed up what surely must be a nearly universal
temptation. It was called “I’m
Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”
I’m
gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
And
make believe it came fro you.
I’m
gonna write words, oh, so sweet
They’re
gonna knock me off my feet
Kisses
on the bottom
I’ll
be glad I’ve got ‘em.
