Pierced Ears

More Asymmetrical Favorites
[Following earlier mismatched
socks and earrings]

You don't have to have pierced ears to wear fun earrings,
but it does make it easier!
And French hooks are the easiest of all.
In the following poem, Tammy Sandel traces her girlhood journey into pierced ear status. Her narrative captures my own lobal coming of age experience precisely, with the exception that I was not 12 but 27 (always a slow starter) before taking the leap for pierced ears.

artiface.

Merle Norman 
was the good make-up
and you had to go in
to, go inside the shop to buy it
right next to Allee’s Jewelry
with the good diamonds,
the add-a-pearls,
the good china and wedding registry

i mix this up a little bit in my mind with the pink Mary Kay house parties and the glossy catalogs
from the Avon Lady at our front door,

but Merle Norman was definitely an actual store of makeup
and also the place to get your ears pierced
when your parent (mother) said okay,
when she drove you there and parked on the town square,
walked in with you to the tidy room with pretty chairs and mirrors like a beauty shop
for a rite of passage like a bat mitzvah for us Southern Baptist girls —
i had to be twelve years old
to get one stud in each lobe

(i mix this part up a little bit with the edgy as heck second piercing i got with a college roommate and the much later tattoo).

way back then i was always startled to see small gold studs in the fairy perfect ears of baby girls,
those lucky Catholic
Mexican sweethearts with amber skin
flashing golden ears and
innocently showing off,
nowhere near twelve years old!
their parents (mothers) having made the decision for them well in advance of puberty,
perhaps to spare any anxiety or remembered pain
(like circumcision logic for a newborn boy),
perhaps to preempt tween earring pleas,
or maybe because she wouldn’t need earring communion with all the other rites of her faith

i never really asked
(next time i’m going to ask)
now, today, i wonder who drives our girls (boys, beloved non-b’s) to
um, the mall? for their first piercing
does a parent give permission,
encouragement,
funds?
do they hold their hand and let them squeeze when a silver piercer pops like a staple gun
or when, as my grandmother did it, someone slides a needle through ice-numbed skin into a
waiting cork?

how do they decide where to go?
(Merle Norman’s gone but maybe “piercing parlors near me” works)
and what to pierce?
there are so many options now
there are so many decisions;

does it still hurt?
next time i’m going to ask

i love the freedom to decorate a body with flash and color and marks of meaning
secret and full
and i love as well
the clean slate of a body wearing only (only!) the marks of a life

every one of us so lucky to have ourselves a life
i’ve lucked on into the negotiated ages of ear piercing and driving, consent, voting, drinking, and well beyond,
my skin growing ever more decorated, fragile and fine,
age spotted stretched and thin,
but still strong, still supple enough to hold
all my wonder and delight
i know it’s personal,
but face it, we often put it right out there
for all the world to see,
dangling from our ears
glossing our lip
riding a nostril
wearing it on our sleeves

and personally i’m loathe to miss a chance to notice it all,
to convince you you’re beautiful,
and simply (profoundly) to connect

so…
tell me the story of that fierce scar
which lipstick shade
who styled your ring
designed that knot
your eyebrows slay
what language script is on your arm?

i can’t help seeing you
with your blaring jewelry body beauty art

and you don’t have to answer,
but next time i’m going to ask.  

###
~Tammy Sandel
Summer 2023

A few weeks after Tammy shared her fabulous poem with me, I came across this corroborative passage from Willa Cather, written in 1913, referring to 1880 or so:

“Marie [dressed up for a fortune telling party] wore a short red skirt of stoutly woven, cloth, a white bodice and kirtle, a yellow silk turban wound low over her brown curls, and long coral pendants in her ears.  

Her ears had been pierced against a piece of cork by her great-aunt when she was seven years old.  In those germless days she had worn bits of broomstraw, plucked from the common sweeping-broom, in the lobes until the holes were healed and ready for little gold rings."
~from O Pioneers! (125-26)

In 1984, my sweet sister - in - law took me to
this jewelry store in Germany to have my ears pierced.

I still have the tiny box that the piercing studs came in.
[shown here with a few more mindful mis-matches]

Additional Earrings
Above designs by Lizone
"A Jewel for Mom"
Ocean City Art
"More Mummy Earring"
Diamond Studs Are Forever

See Next Post:
"esquiline venus." by Tammy Sandel