GING GANG GOOLIE GOOLIE GOOLIE GOOLIE WATCHA

Anne Saywell in hand knit jumper

The above words are often sung by Girl Scouts and Girl Guides and attributed to the authorship of Lord Baden Powell, father of Boy Scouting, but the song can be traced to a cabaret song once performed by the Swedes. If you google the words, you’re likely to turn up several song renditions, accompanied by dance and performed by Girl Scouts and Girl Guides from around the world.

I tuned in to performances recently, just after receiving sad news about the terminal illness of Anne Saywell, my good friend of nearly fifty years’ standing in England. Anne is a famous retired official of Girl Guides who could be called a human encyclopedia of songs, games, and crafts related to scouting for girls worldwide. She taught me “Ging Gang…” on a blistering day in the desert of Khuzestan Province, Iran where we led a TOFS (Troops on Foreign Soil) together for at least a year. Her leadership was an inspiration to Brits, Americans, Iranians, Turks, and other girls and leaders of a multicultural mix living in Ahwaz, Iran. Including me.

 

Diane with TOFS, Ahwaz, Iran 1974

 After playing the song via the Internet, I wrote the following:

“Tragic news arrives. A beloved friend is terminally ill. Grief closes my throat. Memory closes my eyes: Mah Jong at the Golf Club, Khuzestan Province, 120 degrees, Ahwaz, Iran, 1974. She strides across the desert, and I strain to keep up. That brisk British walk pulls me along. We’ve set out for Ahwaz after the game table, too impatient to wait for taxis. Marbles of sweat wet the long hair we both once tended. She runs out on the highway, arms flailing the air. A godsend, the Paykan taxi spins toward us. We begin to laugh. It’s red dog madness, that desert walk. Her laughter echoes. Ahwaz, Iran, 1974. Grief closes my throat. I try to let go.”

“Ging gang goolie goolie goolie goolie watcha,” old friend. I know you’re singing it right now, despite…

ANOTHER WET MORNING

“The silence of too much winter,” I once wrote in a poem, and I might add, “the winter of too much wetness,” as I look out at wet leaf piles heaped in the backyard. A prediction of fog and more rain evokes in me a desire to visit a place I love — the desert of southern California. The feeling is further enhanced when I open a folder that contains copies of postcards my mother collected on a trip to California in the 40’s — cards on which paintings of the desert were shown. The paintings appear on linen cloth cards, and, in particular, I was drawn to two: one of smoke trees in a desert wash and another of Joshua trees jutting into a blue sky.

A great classic book about the desert suitable for the kind of droopy weather we’re experiencing was written by John Van Dyke. It’s simply entitled The Desert, and if you read this tome, you might feel like trading locales, swamp country for desert terrain, for at least a week or so. The author spent three years living in and studying the environment of the desert from a naturalist’s point of view, and he paints with elegant prose what is portrayed in the renderings on the postcards I inherited from my mother.

As I finish up a book of poetry I’m writing — some of the poems based on the desert in Khuzestan Province, Iran — I’m reminded of lines in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “The worldly hope men set their hearts upon, /turns ashes or prospers, and anon,/like snow upon the desert’s dusty face,/lighting a little hour or two is gone.” Since I’ve memorized many of the quatrains in the Rubaiyat, this verse particularly resonates with me because it reminds me of how our everyday pursuits center on vanity and of how much we avoid the desert places if we can. But it’s there that we encounter the Self and our need for a more spiritually centered life. 

I’ve lived in at least two desert places: El Paso, Texas and Ahwaz, Iran, and from 1983-2007, I made annual treks to southern California where the brilliant light often restored my body and spirit. One summer while we traveled to Palmdale, California from Lake Tahoe, which straddles the line between California and Nevada, I sat in the passenger seat of a rented car during a few hours’ journey and was inspired to write 20 poems about the desert places we passed through, e.g., a brief one entitled “Sage Advisory” and another “Near Cartago, California.”

The long green fingers of sage

reach, open-handed, upward,

unafraid of the brilliant sun,

but they are closed,

will store their brilliance

and open their fingers

 only in darkness

when the desert has cooled,

when the universe becomes a plant.

and “Near Cartago, California: Population 75”

Salt flats, fields of uncommon snow

blush at the edges,

brine shrimp wriggling pink.

Not a mile away

from the turn-off to Death Valley 

Joshua trees suddenly jut up,

old men with arms linked,

standing too close to each other,

grousing in the sunlight.

And as I write this, the sky refuses to clear, so I continue going through my mother’s postcards, envisioning her delight… and loving that she, an intrepid adventurer, taught me to appreciate desert life.