Click here for info on the Print Journal (and to purchase your copy)!

Blankie Language

By Sarah Stodola

---------------------------------------

When I was six years old, my family moved from upstate New York to Lexington, Kentucky. My father was going to get his Ph.D. at UK, and my mother was a social worker, so these were leaner times than usual. We moved into a rented duplex on a quiet cul-de-sac, in a nice and ordinary neighborhood. I would live there for three years, I assume until soon after my father finished school.

This was my first move, and the first time that I had to establish a new set of friends. I suppose this can be a difficult thing for a child to go through, but that isn’t how I remember it. I think that maybe at such a young age, one doesn’t know enough to worry about making friends. Anyway, there were a number of other youngsters living in the duplexes of the cul-de-sac, and since we moved at the beginning of summer, I had a few months of freedom during which to befriend them.

I quickly grew close with a girl my age named Julie. She was a typical six-year-old girl - we played Barbies, we conducted school with my stuffed animals, and we ran around in the sprinkler in my front yard quite a bit, since it was such a hot summer - she was normal in most ways I can remember. All ways, in fact, but one.

Julie was wholeheartedly, unequivocally, unconditionally devoted to her blankie. This, in and of itself, isn’t so strange, I suppose. There must be quite a few first-graders out there who are still attached to their blankies. And if this were all there was to it, I probably would never bother telling this story. But Julie’s attachment was quite unlike any I have ever seen or heard of.

Julie had, sometime before I met her and therefore sometime before her seventh birthday, invented an entire language and dedicated it to her blankie.

I’m not kidding.

I didn’t believe it either, at first. Even as a six-year-old, I thought I was above being so gullible as to believe a kid when they claimed to not only speak another language, but to be the inventor of said language. I didn’t have an explanation, but I figured there must be one. I wasn’t gullible, but I was curious. I wanted to figure out how she did it, just as one watches as a magician performs his tricks with one eye toward the magic, and the other toward trying to figure out how he pulled it off. I would randomly ask Julie how to say certain words in Blankie Language. She had an answer most of the time. And if the word happened to be a bit more obscure (obscure by first grade standards, anyway), she had no qualms about acknowledging the limitations of her language, always stating quite simply; “There is no word for that in Blankie Language.” Over time, it became difficult not to believe her.

One might be inclined to suspect that Blankie Language was actually some common foreign language that my young ears were simply too naïve to recognize. I’ve thought of this before, as well. But Julie’s was not a foreign language-speaking type of family. Her last name was Miller, and her dad was a Marine, and they were enthusiastically Christian. People don’t get any more American than this family.

Julie had a sister five years her senior, named Amy. Amy could understand Blankie Language perfectly, and she could speak a little of it. Kind of like me and Spanish. No, okay, I only wish that I understood Spanish as well as Amy understood Blankie Language. You could get the two of them together, and Julie would speak, and Amy would translate, and even speak a little bit herself.

But still I remained skeptical. It just didn’t seem possible that a little girl like Julie could invent her own language. I was in a more advanced reading group in the first grade than Julie was, after all, and I certainly couldn’t invent my own language. And neither could any other kid I’d ever met. Then again, Julie did seem to have a special relationship with her blankie, and who knows what goes through the mind of a six-year-old when they are forming human relationships with inanimate objects. I still don’t understand how it happened - how it could have under any circumstances been possible.

I finally became convinced that Blankie Language was not a practical joke one day when my older brother did something - I can’t remember what anymore - to set off Julie’s temper. Whatever it was that he did, it sent Julie into a Blankie Language rage. Amy was around, and as Julie frantically barked the strange language in my brother’s direction, Amy calmly translated. This was a situation that could not have been planned. And Julie’s clearly angry words were so entirely spontaneous; I can’t imagine she was only putting on a show in order to keep a joke going.

Julie and her family moved away when I was eight years old. I don’t know what became of Blankie Language, or the blankie that inspired it. Maybe it really was just some practical joke that I grudgingly fell for. I haven’t spoken with Julie in 17 or so years now, so I’ll probably never know either way.

But if it was real, it should be studied. Because this was a six-year-old girl who was bright enough, but who certainly wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd of relatively bright six-year-olds. And she loved her blankie so much that she invented a language for it, perhaps so they would have their own private world, her and her blankie. And something like that just shouldn’t be able to happen, not in this world, not in Lexington, Kentucky, where I was so convinced that nothing ever happened.

To this day, I don’t have a clue what to make of it. This could be likened to any of a number of somwhat familiar stories; a Stephen King novel, perhaps, or a movie of the Good Will Hunting variety, or another movie of the Rain Man variety. I don't know which it is, but I do know that it was the strangest thing I had ever seen at the age of six. And 19 years later, although I’ve seen a lot, I’m not so sure that anything has managed to top the story of my little friend Julie and her Blankie Language.

---------------------------------------

Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three