Snail Talk

by Maia Stern

Growing up in Los Angeles, I took walks around the block and found myself stepping on a lot of empty snail shells. The sharp, crunching noise kept me coming back to this one spot, guaranteed to be overloaded with empty snail houses. I never liked the gooey ooey part of the snail, and to this day I hate worms. They are gross. They don't have that nice shell to cover up their grossness. But snails have since grown on me (idiomatically, not actually grown on my body). In fact, I kinda love them.

A couple weeks into the snail house-wrecking period of my life, I was at the car wash with my mom, waiting and being bored and 6 years old or something. There was a weird gift shop vibe at this car wash. It was as if the car wash dudes were thriving off the bored little kids who got tricked into going on errands with their parents. There was this spinning puppet rack, like the kind you'd see in a toy store. Of all the fluffy and soft animals I could stick my hand into, I chose the snail puppet. My mom bought me Snaily, the snail puppet, and from then on out Snaily officially came with me everywhere I went. Here is a picture of Snaily and I, dinning.

It is easy to imagine Snaily’s fate resembling Woody’s in Toy Story 3, just chilling on the bed, waiting to get played with. But Snaily was actually a big hit in college. Rather than just a puppet, he was kind of a comforting glove. You put Snaily on your arm and you can still pretty much do anything you would normally do, it's just a little funnier looking. You forgot that you were wearing a snail and went about your business - eat a banana, turn off the light, something. My friends' evolving intrigue in Snaily and their appreciation for my random interest in all things snails made it easy to get me birthday gifts. I started to rack up on the snail paraphernalia. I left college with a snail lamp, a snail clock, a couple snail candles, a snail necklace, an I <3 Snails magnet, a snail-print cloth from straight-up Africa, a couple snail shirts and the list goes on. Nowadays, people send me sweet images of snails or photos they've taken and think of me when anything snail-related is involved.

Anytime the moment arises where one would need to draw something on a wall, or carve their name in a tree or just generally graffiti (pretend that's a verb) something, out comes a snail. It's a nice go-to and I feel pretty lucky to have it. The other day in the subway, I saw someone had drawn a snail smoking a cigarette on a poster. I think I have a doppelganger out there. That's cool.

Contact Maia at maiastern@gmail.com. Visit her at her blog and her vimeo.