When I think of childhood, I always think of the school yard.
It was the only sacred ground that was ours. Everything else was the dominion of adults: classrooms, gymnasiums, even the streets we lived on all belonged to the rules of parents and teachers and nosy neighbors. But backyards and schoolyards were the wilderness, the kingdoms of children.
And on every schoolyard, there was an oracle. Or often, many.
Children’s playground in the sanatorium park, Shklo, Ukraine [Wikimedia Commons, Rbrechko, CC 4.0]
The divination of the schoolyard emerges from the objects that we have available. Gatorade bottles, cootie catchers, flipped coins – and the one I grew up with, straw wrappers.
Whether Capri Sun plastic or traditional paper, we tied them in knots and pulled until the material broke, leaving us with either two torn pieces or one torn piece and one with an offending knot at the end. If you had two clean pieces, someone had a crush on you. But if you had a knot? No crush.
Lauren Parker’s wrapper has a knot – no crush for her. [L. Parker]
Like a lot of folk love divination, I don’t know where this came from. I don’t know who taught it to us, who declared the meaning or why. But it’s like peeling apple skins to determine the name of your future husband, or naming roasting nuts to see how a relationship will go. It’s nonsense, it’s silly, it’s probably not even accurate. And also every time I’m handed a straw I dutifully tie a knot to see if someone somewhere is thinking of me fondly.
As a 36-year-old, this is less cute than it was when I was a kid. It’s one thing to play MASH on our notebook edges to see if you’ll fall in love with Jonathon Taylor Thomas and have to live in a mansion or a shack, but it’s quite another to tie the wrapper of a coffee stirrer while holding up the line for donuts and being crestfallen by the knot.
“Coffee stirrers don’t count,” I tell myself, an adult. “It’s only straws, probably.”
The ritual used to be elaborate. First it was tying the straw wrapper to determine the scenario, and then taking the straw and running through the alphabet while poking the seal on whatever 90’s mom-approved Koolaid knock-off was in your foil capped container. Whichever letter the wrapper broke on was the first letter of the name of your future love. Naturally if you had a crush on someone, you suddenly became strong when it got to the letter that started their name.
My mother learned the straw wrapper trick from my sister, and when she explained it to my stepfather and she got a knot, he tore the knot off.
“All fixed,” he said, and tossed the knot over his shoulder.
Lauren Parker’s wrapper has no knot – someone is crushing on her. [L. Parker]
I’ve been doing the straw wrapper trick a lot lately. Why? Well I’ve been too exhausted to figure out what to have for lunch and there’s been a sudden uptick in the number of paper straw wrappers I’ve had access to. And in a chaotic world, and in the sensory overwhelm of the times, it’s nice to be reminded that maybe someone thinks I’m hot.
I don’t have to be deep about everything. Sometimes I just want everyone to tell me I’m pretty.
But the context of divination is the part that often goes unexplored. Why do I need this right now? Is this actually fun? Is it normal as a Fully Grown Adult to have 15 full minutes of my day negatively impacted by the mechanics of tying a knot in paper?
The straw wrapper’s divinatory evolution went from “crush” to “thinking of” over the course of my time in grade school. It shifted along with my social understanding of the mortification of wanting someone to like you and also the onset of puberty. The confidence of desire, and the terror from it, made the word “crush” unbearable to admit. It was one of the many things about childhood that was conditioned to shrink.
I consider that now, as I post to my Instagram story the offending knot, declaring to my friends list and every other sucker who follows me that no one has a crush on me with the maudlin tones that my cat uses when dinner is eight seconds late.
My Instagram DMs light up with rebuttals and requests for clarification.
“What am I even looking at?” one read, and I explained the rules.
“A truly infallible source,” another said.
“Let me have my cafeteria divination,” I said. “It’s a convenient excuse to pout.”
And maybe that’s what it’s really for. It allows me to blow off some of the insecurity I’m carrying around with me, even if just for a daily 15 minutes.
Once a schoolyard oracle, always a schoolyard oracle, it would seem. Accessing my inner child isn’t just about tapping into the good parts, but the clammy and mortified bits too.
And I really do have a good feeling about Johnathon Taylor Thomas and me.
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