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I was a failed Girl Scout.
This does not mean that I was drummed out of the Scouts for moral turpitude, embezzlement of cookie money, or failure to sing High Up, High On the Mountain in a pleasing manner. I had my little green uniform and my little green sash, and no one was prouder of the Sign of the Star than I was. My first merit badges were in needlework, which shouldn't surprise anyone, and cooking, which should given that I'm about as interested in the finer points of preparing meals as I am in diesel engines.
No, my failure came about thanks to a nasty cold I acquired in the late winter of my first year as a Scout. This was back in the old days, when Scouts were actually supposed to go door to door selling cookies, not sit outside grocery stores selling boxes of Tagalongs (then called Peanut Butter Patties) or hand off sign-up sheets to their parents so Mommy and Daddy's co-workers can get their Thin Mint fix for the year. Everyone in my troop was given a territory, a cheat sheet touting the good works that would be financed by the sale of each and every box, and instructions to sell forty-five boxes of cookies so we'd make our yearly quota.
All this was well and good, and I was more than prepared to wear out my Mary Janes tromping the mean streets of Middleburg Heights, Ohio. I'd actually sold three boxes of cookies to my piano teacher and was all set to inflict my winsome green-clad self on the neighbors until I started coughing, sneezing, and running an impressive fever. My pediatrician forbade me to go outside to do anything, let alone sell cookies, for fear that I'd contact pneumonia, bronchitis, or some other interesting lung disease, and I spent what should have been the prime sale weeks watching TV and trying to figure out why anyone would be stupid enough to watch Winky Dink, let alone actually draw a bridge so he and his friends could escape the bad guys.
Homebound I was, and miserable knowing that I'd let down the troop. If it hadn't been for my father buying the remaining forty-two boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and my mother freezing most of them, I would have been inconsolable. As it was, we enjoyed a steady diet of Girl Scout cookies well into July, and I must say that Thin Mints taste just fine with Baskin-Robbins French Vanilla.
Fortunately we moved to Virginia the next year, and I don't remember any cookie quotas at my new troop. They did, however, hike and camp out a lot more than my troop in Ohio, and one of the reasons I ended up with a massive tonsil infection and spent much of Christmas 1970 convalescing may have been all the hours I spent wading through pristine Appalachian streams, eating bargain basement hot dogs, and similarly enjoying the alleged delights of Scouting.
I also nearly cut off my thumb attempting to whittle, but that is neither here nor there.
Alas, I dropped out before becoming a Cadet, which meant that I missed the joys of wearing an ugly white blouse and a beanie that would have looked stupid on Winky Dink. I also missed the revolution in Scouting that took place thanks to the women's movement, the one that junked those hideous uniforms in favor of slacks, useless crafts involving felt and glitter in favor of scientific experiments, and feminized woodcraft in favor of a return to the original intent of Scouting.
This isn't a surprise to anyone who's actually been a Girl Scout, or knows anything about the Girl Scouts' founder, Juliette Gordon Low. Juliette Gordon, best known as Daisy, was the great-granddaughter of a white girl who had been adopted by the Seneca chief Cornplanter. In many ways she was the ideal Scout: intelligent, spirited, and strong, her hobbies including hunting, enjoying the great outdoors, and metalsmithing so she could build the gates to her country house in England. Her non-Scouting accomplishments including organizing a hospital for war wounded during the Spanish-American War, as well as a successful lawsuit against her husband's estate after Mr. Low died and attempted to leave his entire estate to his mistress.
Daisy, who had severe hearing problems thanks to a freak accident on her wedding day, founded the Girl Scouts of America after meeting Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and bonding with him over their shared enthusiasm for blacksmithing. Daisy intended the Girl Scouts to be a means by which girls could leave the family circle and develop qualities of leadership, self-reliance, and good old American resourcefulness through outdoor activities, community activities. Her aim was to produce girls with backbone and a strong sense of duty, not the gentle, fainting ornaments of Edwardian fiction.
To this day the Girl Scouts are staffed, run, and intended solely for girls and women, regardless of the body one was born with. The Girl Scouts are a rare and refreshing national organization that simultaneously promotes wholesome American values while making sure that its youthful members have a good time, learn something useful and scientifically accurate, and treat their fellow Scouts like human beings regardless of whether they have a mommy and daddy, two mommies, two daddies, and or one or the other. Modern Scouts can and do earn merit badges in subjects like being a locavore, public policy, and geocaching and if a young Cadet or Senior Scout finds herself dreaming of the captain of the field hockey team instead of the football team, no one much cares.
Unlike the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts don't care if you're religious, agnostic, gay, straight, rich, poor, disabled, or transgendered. All they care about is the kids (and the cookies), and if that means that the less enlightened aren't all that happy, so be it. Daisy herself never let a crappy marriage, deafness, or the cancer that eventually killed her slow her down, and in a time when women were encouraged to stay home, she forged her own path and showed young girls that they could more than drudges or decorations. The American dream of self-reliance and inner strength became acceptable in the mainstream at least in part because of the Girl Scouts, and that includes girls like Bobby Montoya.
Tonight I bring but one book, but it and its author perfectly exemplify this type of red-blooded Americanism. Timothy Dexter may have been a man, not a woman (or a girl), but he lived his life to suit himself, and if he failed to produce something as lasting as the Girl Scouts (or a frozen box of Trefoils), he likely would not have much cared. Individualism is a fine old Yankee trait, after all, and that this country allows individuals like tonight's author to survive and flourish is proof that for all its flaws, America isn't such a bad place to live:
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress, by Lord Timothy Dexter. Despite the title, this little book is not an early American housekeeping guide, nor is it an 18th century tailor's manual. What it is, is not entirely clear. Is it a treatise on philosophy? A memoir? Advice for living in the new American republic? A marital guide?
Perhaps a quotation will help solve the mystery:
IME the first Lord in the younited States of A mericary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt a Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare then goue on all is Easey....
Hm. That's a bit opaque, especially this business about "the Eare." Perhaps another passage will help:
The yong man that doth most all my Carving his work is much Liked by our grat men I felt founney one day I thort I would ask sade young man whare he was bone he sade Now whare what is all that Now whare was your mother over shaded17 I says my mother was if I was to gess No I tell in Now town borne o on the water I says you beat me and so wee Lafed and it shuk of the spleane shoue him A Crows Neast he can carve one A fine fellow --- I shold had all marbel if any bodey could to me the prise so I have sent for 8 busts for kings and grat men and 1 Lion & 2 gray hounds I hope to hear in foue Days to all onnest men.
Dear me, that really didn't help much, did it? Maybe this will be better:
Fourder what diffrent wous we have of this world & the other world two good women Liven in a town whare I once lived one was sick of consumsion Near Death both belonged to the Church very onnest only the well woman was weak in wous & thing says unto the sik woman I thinks you will see my housbon doue tell him I and my son A greus very well and wee are all well and the sow is piged and got seaven pritty pigs and fare you well sister this I belieave is serting troue & so fare the well --- I shall com A gane in Littel while
Uh huh. I see.
Well, if reading the actual work is no help, perhaps there are some clues in the author's life? Just who was this Lord Timothy Dexter, and what was he thinking?
The who is relatively straightforward. Timothy Dexter, born in 1748, began as a merchant of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a town north of Boston. He must have come across as somewhat less than canny, since his fellow townsmen gave him laughably bad advice about what to ship where, all of which Dexter cheerfully took to heart. There's no other reason for someone to ship a cargo consisting entirely of bed-warmers to a tropical land like Jamaica, for instance, especially when the rest of the backup goods consisted only of domestic cats, not something useful like cloth or lucrative like silver tableware. And why would an allegedly sharp businessman waste precious time and money sending warm woolen mittens to the lovely tropical islands of the distant South Seas? Or an entire ship full of coal to a coal mining region like Newcastle?
A fool Timothy Dexter must have been, for he took this ludicrous advice and followed it to the letter: bed warmers and mousers to Jamaica, mittens to Polynesia, coals to Newcastle. Doubtless the good folk of Newburyport snickered over the stupidity of Timothy Dexter, and enjoyed many a laugh at his expense.
Little did they know that, as my late father always put it, "God loves a fool." For the coals arrived in Newcastle in the middle of a strike that had jacked the price to the equivalent of post-Katrina natural gas levels. The tropical cargoes fared even better; the bed warmers were the perfect size and shape to use as molasses dippers on the sugar plantations, and the mittens were promptly bought by visiting Chinese merchants who were looking for something warm and sturdy to sell to their trading partners in Siberia. Best of all, Dexter's felines arrived in Kingston just in time to make short work of a plague of rats that was threatening to overrun the whole island.
Far from being ruined by bad advice, Timothy Dexter became rich. He became even richer after the Revolution, when the Continental Congress redeemed all the paper dollars he'd patriotically bought for a few cents at their full face value. Was it any wonder that he began calling himself "Lord Timothy Dexter" even though the proud new Republic had no titles of nobility? Or that he bought himself one of the grandest houses in town as a way of displaying his newfound wealth?
Alas, riches did not bring happiness, or a secure place in what passed for society in Newburyport. The very people who had advised him to sell the cats, and the warming pans, and the mittens, now scorned him as being Not Our Kind. Despite his wealth and his fine new house, Lord Timothy Dexter found himself a pariah, an outcast in his natal city. So Lord Timothy set out to show the good people of Newburyport just what was what.
He began by building a mausoleum for himself and his long suffering wife. That was not particularly odd, as anyone who visits a New England cemetery can testify, but note that most such edifices are indeed in cemeteries. Lord Timothy's was in his yard, right where everyone passing by could see it. Even better, he set up a series of classically inspired pillars topped with finely carved wooden statues of famous men. Many were of Biblical figures like Adam and Eve, or Revolutionary heroes like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, but others were less obvious; Lord Timothy was a patriotic American, so what was William Pitt doing there? Or that odious little Frenchman Bonaparte?
More to the point, what was Lord Timothy himself doing up there on a pedestal? Surely he wasn't comparing himself to Washington? Was he? Was he?
And why was he telling everyone that his poor wife was a ghost? Mrs. Dexter may have been a bit of a nag, but she was very much alive, and none too pleased to be living with all those statues. She likely was even less pleased when her husband hired a large and expensive retinue of servants, only a few of whom were needed to run the house and tend the statues; whatever
Mrs. Dexter had expected when she married, it surely wasn't a fortune teller (presumably to tell her husband when the next litter of kittens should be dispatched to Jamaica), a poet laureate, or a professional idiot lounging about making the family even more of a laughingstock than it already was.
And then Lord Timothy, having achieved the worthy age of fifty years, wrote a book.
This should not have surprised anyone. Lord Timothy had long since put a sign at the entrance to his home that proudly proclaimed I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western World, so it was only a matter of time before such an accomplished man shared his thoughts with the world. A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, for those unwilling to wade through the...eccentric...spelling and non-existent punctuation, is part autobiography, part advice based on Lord Timothy's vast experience of the world, and part bitch fest about politicians, ministers, and (of course) his ghost wife. At first Lord Timothy handed out free copies to anyone who showed the slightest interest, but soon word got out of this remarkable production, and soon A Pickle for the Knowing Ones began selling briskly. It went through eight editions in short order and still periodically shows up at fine historic house gift shops and used bookstores, courtesy of small imprints like Peter Pauper and other fine publishers. Best of all, most editions are drawn from the second edition, which included thirteen lines of punctuation marks that Lord Timothy included so that readers upset about his...unusual...writing style could "peper and solt it as they plese."
Lord Timothy Dexter lived for eight more years after the publication of his only book, surrounded by his statues, his entourage of servants, and what looks like the mutant offspring of a pig and a miniature pinscher. His later years were enlivened by a mock funeral that he staged for himself because he wanted to see how people would really act when he died; he was gratified to see what several thousand people crowded Newburyport to bid him farewell, but was less than pleased when his ghost wife didn't cry.
So were the mourners when they heard him yelling at her.
Alas, Lord Timothy himself became a ghost (or something) a few years after his funeral. Most of his statues succumbed to the elements, the exception being William Pitt, and his fine house was turned into a hotel. It later became a library, which is only fitting for the Greatest Philosopher in the Western World.
Whether the library contained bed warmers, mittens, or a population of fat tropical tabbies is unknown.
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So, good friends - what pickles of wisdom have you for us tonight? What tales of self-reliance and strength can you share? Were you ever a Girl Scout? A ghost? Been within ten miles of Newburyport? It's Saturday night, so come share....
