The scratch that itches

Is it okay to scratch where it itches?  Is it okay to scratch your head continuously while spending your day at a public library?  Why are you scratching?  Do you have head lice?  Are you off your anxiety medication?

What is the evolutionary function of itching?  How does scratching relieve an itch?  Why does watching someone else scratch make us feel itchy?  How does scratching send a signal to other people? Do we want to sit where a scratchy person has been sitting....?

I have two jobs.  Monday through Friday I work with preschoolers. Most Saturdays I work at a public library in an affluent neighborhood.  Still, we have regular library users who may not have a permanent home address, timely hygiene opportunities, or who may not be taking medications regularly. They may offend  sensibilities of the local residents. While these users may be eccentric and entertaining characters, the library staff worries and prays for their health and safety when they leave the stacks. In most public libraries users only need to be residents of the area to obtain a library card for borrowing privileges.  Libraries offer many services for non-borrowing visitors. And those visitors using internet computers and restrooms, reading newspapers, drinking coffee with sugar, and staying in air-conditioning on 100+ degree days are part of the marvelous, civilized, public-supported concept of libraries. Sometimes those visitors itch and scratch. Other times the privileged local kiddies have head lice. Itching crosses economic borders.

Back in the Monday-Friday classroom we attempt to teach children that nose-picking, hair-sucking, underwear-exploring and other scratching habits are socially unacceptable. We watch for the telltale scratching that signals a case of head lice. If a case is suspected or reported, the lead teacher straps on her spelunking head lamp and begins searching every student's head for nits. While she does this, I try to maintain normal class routine. Usually I begin to wonder if I might actually have head lice. Sometimes I want to scratch all my hair right off my head!

If you read these words, can your refrain from scratching?

• mosquito 
• eczema
• chicken pox
• stress 
• anxiety
• fleas
• lice
• crabs
• hives
• jellyfish
• chiggers
• poison ivy
• poison oak
• diaper rash
• Oklahoma*

NORRIS: Is there such a thing as sympathetic itch, just by talking about it, you can actually trigger that sensation?

Dr. YOSIPOVITCH: Oh, that's an excellent point that has been shown in study where people, healthy people, sitting in a auditorium seeing a patient scratching and itching, about 60 percent of the people in the audience started scratching themselves. And it was documented

*The months between Thanksgiving 1987 and Thanksgiving 1988 are my Year of Itching Dangerously in Edmond, Oklahoma.  My three sons had chicken pox in succession, inside their noses, ears, and every other orifice. Our rental house was infested with fleas and then mice. I was pretty sure I was stressed to the max and  lousing my mind....  No, I meant losing my mind! Typo alert. Take Benadryl. 

 

 © 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Lurger Burger

Toddlers bring strange words into a family's vocabulary. Sometimes the toddler word lurks submerged in the subconscious until decades after the meaning has been forgotten.

More decades ago than I want to admit, a toddler, who might have been me, came up with the term "lurger burger". It bubbled to the surface the other day when I was pantomiming scuba divers with my preschool art students. The kids are at that age when putting their face in the water and blowing bubbles is the main focus of swim lessons, so they know that bubbles make gurgle-burgle sounds.

Once "lurger burger" surfaced, I got the mental equivalent of The Bends. My gosh! How many times did Jacques Cousteau warn me about that during the Sixties? Due to our family tv set back then, I am always surprised when Jacques'undersea world is not black and white!



What was "lurger burger?" Person, place, or thing? No clue. I called my dad late at night--after 8:30--to ask about this toddler word. He remembered the term, but didn't recall if it was animal, mineral, or vegetable. Bewitched, bothered, or bewildered? Magician, mathemetician, or musician? We are stumped.

A few days pass. Dad wants to know if I've figured out "lurger burger." Still no. He thinks it might have been a person at his office in the mid-Fifties. Neither of us think it was a food*.

My own kids had some toddler words. The one that pops to mind first is "rackoo". "Rackoo" is a combination of the toddler drop game of "Oh-oh," Chinese water torture, and a Hot Wheels-style John Deere tractor:

1. Toddler in carseat on family driving vacation holds toy tractor.
2. Toddler in carseat throws toy tractor to the floor of the 1985 Ford Tempo.
3. Toddler in carseat screams, "Rackoo! Rackoo! Rackoo!," with increasing agitation and volume until mother retrieves toy tractor from the floor and gives it back. [Dad is driving and bigger preschooler is in the front seat listening to Wee Sing cassettes.]
4. Repeat Steps 1-3 from Omaha, Nebraska to the Grand Tetons.
5. Mom tries unsuccessfully to repress the memory of this particular toddler word.

The second toddler word is a splendidly descriptive term for the space created by taking all the cushions and pillows off a soft, but ugly jungle-print hand-me-down sofa, and piling them up to make a cave/fort. When you sit in this space, you are in "the crabbis-crow." "Crabbis-crow" is on my mind as my students make wacky pirate ship hats with crows nests. A sofa-cushion cave is a bit like a house for a hermit crab/toddler, plus it rhymes with Jacques Cousteau's Calypso. After a long, hectic week of teaching, I am ready to sit in my own "crabbis-crow" for a day or two!

But "lurger burger" still eludes recall. It doesn't have a frightening gut connotation like "the Gooies," or "pea burgers." "The Gooies" are worse than The Bends. They are the creepy things down the stairs in a dark basement.

Pea burgers are the scary concoction of a harried mom trying to stretch the ground beef by mixing in a can of peas from the basement pantry. Nowadays the Dallas Morning News prints ideas for "desperation dinners." I'm sure my mom got the idea for "pea burgers" from a similar journalistic hint. Still, the pea burgers were the inedible food for family lore and nightmares, along with the "cardboard box cake."

My elementary students are sitting in a circle around the rug to play a game I call, "What's something you might find in the ocean THAT NOBODY ELSE HAS SAID?" It's a good game for encouraging listening, visualization, problem-solving, and for stocking the group's creative pantry. The kids start our second effort at the game with good ideas:

1. Tiger shark
2. Electric eel
3. Stingray
4. Water
5. Sand
6. Angelfish
7. Treasure chest
8. A killer whale and her baby
9. Seaweed
10. "A great big, a really GREAT BIG... [The child then periscope-ups his index finger into his left nostril and brings forth a GIANT LURGER BURGER] ... batch of plankton."

*Definitely not a food!