I bought a ball from The Dollar Tree last week. It’s soft and squishy, about the size of a newborn’s head, lime green and covered all over with porcupine-like quills—except the quills are soft and squishy, too. I didn’t mean to buy it. It was on the floor and I picked it up to put it back in its place on the shelf. Something I don’t do at home. (Only tidy in public. People are watching.)
Once I picked up the ball, I needed it because…I kneaded it. The sensation of squishing this gelatinous thing was beyond pleasure. I pressed the limp quills to my lips, too, and felt I was being kissed by a sea pig. The whole sensation of squishing and pressing was something close to eating ice cream while smoking pot. I had to own this ball so I could experience this feeling forever. Or until the ball rotted or I failed at being resuscitated. I paid for the ball, mumbling something to the cashier about it being for my grandchild.
Now the ball is at home with me at rest on the piano bench near the door where, when folks come in, I can offer it to them to feel. Go ahead, I say, Squeeze. One roofing salesman has declined, but other visitors have accepted. They feel it. They look at me. They put it down. Uh-huh, they say. They are bemused. I am confused. Do they not feel it? The primordial sludge and ooze of it? You stick your fingers into the soft pappus of the rubber hairs, and you know what a midwife does.The senses. Where would we be without them? We learn about them in kindergarten: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. The least of these—at least in terms of our thinking about it—is touch. (There are more senses than these five, but they have long Latinate names and I don’t want to to get into it. It strains my brain. And then there’s ESP.)
Not all of us engage in the same way with our senses. I had a dear friend who, when we would go for walks, used her sight only to look at the ground. Maybe it helped her to think while we conversed. To be undistracted by the incredible mountainous clouds, or the great and ancient noble beech tree dying near the Shakespeare Park entrance, or the magnificent five-foot-wingspanned egret. But when she would find a coin, she would be so pleased that I believe that was her reason for always looking at the ground. Well, she did use her sight for that, anyway.
And I knew a man who would describe the taste of certain dishes with the love and language of a poet. You would think he was talking about being touched by God. He lived to taste. And once, while standing in the hall of Brennan Middle School in Attleboro, MA, I lightly touched the shoulder of the colleague I was chatting with who then flinched…no, she leapt three feet back!… saying, “I don’t like to be touched.” And I was not hitting on her, nor was she on the spectrum. She was just not into touch.
What I’m saying is that a particular sense can be something special to one person and abhorrent to another. What I am also saying is that, in my opinion, the sense of touch is much un-thought about, much underrated. People will say, “I could hear her hit that high C perfectly all the way from the Mew Haven Cat Cafe, and it made me want to cry,” but you will hardly ever hear someone say, “When I touch the egg, its smooth, cool hairlessness makes me believe in the Rapture.”
A little story: Once long ago, desperate for a job, I applied for a job as a secretary in a Westport ad agency. The two bosses interviewed me. At the end, curious and suspicious both, they asked why, when I had those degrees, I would want to be a secretary. And I said, and truthfully, “Oh, I love to type! I get a tactile pleasure from typing!” They exchanged looks. They stifled their snickers, and they said, “Well, then….” and they gave me the job.
So now you know that I am a toucher. (Don’t be afraid.) Think about touching and, while you are still operative, touch the sleek nubs on your grandmother’s hobnail bud vase, the rasp on your dog’s tongue, the weird fur on a peach. Register the delicious feeling. Think of the many nerve endings in your fingers that are generating electrical signals that travel to your spinal cord and then to your brain and make the brain shout, “Oh wow!” like Steve Jobs’ last words, and you will never need hallucinogens.
