It was as I was starting to find traction at the Madison Press in London, Ohio, that I one day pointed the steel-and-plastic Ford Pinto wagon my father had given me for graduation toward the Madison County hamlet of Newport.
(By then, the Pinto’s muffler was being held on by a red, white and blue camera strap designed to help celebrate the bicentennial.)
The Wormmobile, maybe it was the Worm Wagon, turned out to be a van a few oil changes past its prime. Its proprietor informed me of the production process: he ordered the creatures, let them loose in a box loaded with proper amounts of newspapers and soil, and the worms went about digesting the newspapers and growing to the point they could fulfill their ultimate calling on the barb of a fishhook.
To date, I’ve avoided the fishhook. But the other day it struck me how like a worm’s life mine has been.
Substitute the printed content of newspapers, books and magazines for the physical content of the paper itself, and I have pretty much followed the worm’s path: digesting what’s in front of me and adding it to whatever else is stored in the musty gray attic above my shoulders.
I have written stories along the way, which others, in turn, have read and digested. Whether what I’ve done is more valuable to society than the worm’s output, I’ll allow others to judge. (I also stipulate that the work worms do may be, in the grand scheme of things, a good deal more beneficial to the planet.)
Just as worms make their way through soil, we human creatures plow through experience, trying to learn from it along the way. In addition to reading, of course, we learn by listening and speaking to one another, tools we use to take in, chew on and break down information into more digestible form.
Radio and television are extensions of the same process. And now cell phones, BlackBerries and other devices give us antennae to constantly communicate and to stay in touch with our collective store of knowledge, or at least what is available online.
The other day, I heard a report in which a person studying the phenomenon talked about how being connected with one another or online constantly may not be the best thing for our brains — that the constant stimulation doesn’t allow for the downtime our brains need to process information, to properly digest it, if you will.
He didn’t use the term mental acid reflux , but that was the general idea. And that made me think those worms had something to teach me after all.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.