I know cattywampus. I’ve seen it. Heck, I’ve even been a part of the cattywampus at times. It means to be askew. Sometimes slightly, sometimes largely. When something is cattywampus, it is in disarray, or not in order. Like, a picture may be all cattywampus hanging on the wall.
Cattywampus is the bane of the obsessive-compulsive person. And I am that person. And I have known cattywampus.
When I was a kid, one of our neighbors used to have a bunch of framed pictures on one wall. I was probably only six or seven when I first started going there, but it became my childhood quest to keep those things lined up. For years. I was forever straightening their pictures, most of the time when they were not watching.
They must have lived on a fault line, or perhaps they did a great deal of clog dancing on the floor above, as those frames would be askew most every time I walked into their living room. But they had great food, so the trade-off was more than acceptable.
This cattywampus word was on my mind from the minute I woke up this morning. I opened my eyes and there it was. So I looked it up, first thing, when I got on my computer, for reassurance. It was not in the “Dictionary” app on my Mac. The New Oxford American Dictionary. I moved my search online to Merriam-Webster. They had it. Good old cattywampus. See catawampus.
catawampus noun
(Entry 1 of 2)
: an imaginary fierce wild animal: bogey
catawampus adjective
(Entry 2 of 2)
1 dialectal: fierce, savage, destructive
2 dialectal: askew, awry, cater-cornered
I think perhaps the word was so prominently placed in my brain this morning because I looked at Facebook before I went to sleep last night. Sometimes, it feels like the world’s turned upside down, and the only thing that is holding my feet to it, is the good discovery by Isaac Newton, that persuasive thing called gravity. I saw one post after another where people were creating or perpetuating divisiveness. Posts that were geared and focused on tearing down “the other side.” I don’t mind the articles or posts that are based in fact, that come from a trusted source, that have been researched by fact-checkers. But I do mind the batshit-crazy conspiracy theory posts that don’t hold an ounce of truth, only designed to create a division, to knock things off balance, to turn things on end.
All cattywampus.
My spirits sink when I see these things. Worry begets me. It makes me sad, or even worse, angry.
Then, I was reminded of a movie. I can’t recall exactly what the title was, but the gist was this. All the magical people, like Jack Frost, and the Tooth Fairy, and Wood Nymphs, were fading away because people stopped believing in them. And they just needed to convince people to give them credence once again. If people would only believe, they would get their magic back.
That’s when it hit me. We can’t let the goodness fade away. We can’t let things like love, compassion, kindness, and hope drift off into obscurity. To combat the darkness of hatred, we have to bring on the light of love. We have to continue believing in those things again.
We have to line up the picture frames on the wall. To right them.
There’s one more thing I’d like to add. Today is National Toothfairy Day. Let’s keep believing in the magic, whatever it takes.
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“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl
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“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”
― Charles de Lint
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