On the hunt for words

“We were staying in a remote part of Scotland and in the evenings we read aloud to each other as our entertainment.”  So recounts journalist and fiction writer Annalena McAfee.  She’s speaking in a video interview posted on Amazon, recalling how she began writing her novel, “The Spoiler.”  The kicker is that her evening reading partner and husband is novelist Ian McEwan.  Maybe they read the dictionary together too?  Evenings in remote Scotland might drive you to it. 

I read “The Spoiler” this summer and it was a page turner.  Aging, former wartime journalist named “Honor” (one of the “virtue names,” so English) confronts a young and brash interviewer, a tabloid writer named Tamara.  Think Ernest Hemingway’s Martha Gellhorn in loose slacks meets Rupert Murdoch’s Rebekah Brooks in frizzy red hair.
 

Nicknamed “the Marlene Dietrich of the newsroom”, Honor lives in her glamorous past.  Her heyday was adventure journalism, going to dangerous places to “get the story” behind historic events. The Spanish Civil War to Mao’s Long March.  But now---the 1990s---the trashy tabloids pass for newspapers.  A young, brash climber named Tamara gets to interview Honor by a mistake.  Turning an error to career advantage, the ignorant Tamara instinctively pursues the aging legend.  Secrets of a distinguished past emerge. A bloody last battle in the decade before both worlds of print---serious and tabloid---succumb to the electronic.

Annalena McAfee’s sentences were a pleasure of clarity and syntax.  But the diction---the words.  At first I thought these were just British expressions, surely I could easily intuit their meaning from the context.  But as the novel progressed, I encountered more and more of them. 

I was reading on a Kindle, my trusty travel companion.  Its electronic screen a fitting page while in the sky on the way to California.  Four and a half hours to read with no interruptions; a Bombay Sapphire on the credit card. But a bit tricky to highlight and flick to the e-reader dictionary.  A few bumps and bounces over the Rockies could threaten this fragile set up. Sketchy Delta service can’t be trusted for prompt replacement of gin. So I took to making a paper list.  Here it is:

Otiose, fug, blethering, oleaginous, titivating, gazump (ed), gawp, mote, boffin, poiumenon, japes, bint,  hared about, compère, banjaxed, susurration, poncey, duff, swots, suppurating, chthonic,  panjandrum, cumbrous, uncumber, oubliette, juju, juddering, gawpers, deliquescence, shambolic, chomolungma.

High school Latin helped with some of these; ditto college French.   There is a least on biblical term (mote), and some anthropology (chthonic). But “swot” and “poncy”?  Is this public school banter?  “Panjandrum”? Are we in Indja with the Raj?  

I am utterly banjaxed.  

So what is husband Ian McEwan’s vocabulary like?  I hadn’t recalled from the two novels I’d read long ago, but courtesy of the Kindle, I opened his most recent novel, Sweet Tooth. A month ago I’d breezed through it without issues, I thought.  Sure enough, out popped: squit, orotund, moue, canting, pargeted, plumminess, pollarded wood.

Most of my life people have remarked on my vocabulary.  The sole offspring of educated and somewhat intellectual parents, I was the child audience of adult debates that were better than TV. Especially 50’s TV.  Family friends often commented on my advanced vocabulary.  I secretly relished this distinction from grown-ups.  OK. I was pridefully complicit in appearing to be an amateur prodigy. But I was observant. Quick to mimic sounds, to move verbally in pace with my elders. Alert to the significance of context even when not understood. 

So with some chagrin---and after decades in academia---I now find that the real vocabulary grown-ups are the Brits.  And they are way beyond me. 

Understandably, of course.  They have their own lexicon and turns of phrase.  But still, the ones I read are not obscure.  Ian McEwan and Martin Amis adorn the Anglo-American best-seller lists; younger British aspirants, outside the snooty class, are worthy too.  Here’s a little list from Harriet Lane’s Alys, Always: frowsty, cornichons, benison, tetanque, groynes, skirls, knackered, spliff, lappet, hellebore, pongee, weir.

Now I’ve turned to the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker.  Staples of educated (but not erudite) American readers and what do I find?  Tinnital, orisons, estivating, clinquant.

In my defense, I should say that I am a good guesser.  Some of these words suggest faint associations just shy of true recognition.  But that’s not enough anymore.  “The game’s afoot,” as Sherlock would say.  And I am on the hunt.  Searching for words.  I’ve signed up with “Dictionary.com” for a daily word fix. Bookmarked the thesaurus.  I refuse to be banjaxed. Which, by way of online Merriam-Webster, means damaged or ruined.  The usage is chiefly Irish.  Wouldn’t you know.  Now if I could just get some attendant to deliver a gin and tonic.

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My family clock

Winding the clock was my Dad’s Sunday morning ritual, done while still in his pajamas. He’d already brought in the paper, had a smoke, and plugged in the Farberware coffee pot.  It’s an eight-day mantel clock that strikes the hours and dings the half hours.  Eight inches wide by twelve inches high. Decades of dust and polish have darkened its mahogany housing. 

My Dad opened its glass door by its brass rim or bezel and reached for the double end key that lay on the top of the clock.  He inserted the larger end of the key first into the shaft on the right side of the face, just under the number 4.  This wound the hours. Then he moved the key over and inserted it into the shaft on the left, under the number 8, winding the hour strike and the half hour chime. Gently, but deliberately. Not too tight---that could be fatal.  You never want to wind a clock too tight, everyone said. 

Then my Dad padded over to the black telephone in the far corner of the dining room and dialed “Time.” “At the sound of the tone, the time will be  . . . .  and thirty seconds.”  He returned and nudged the hour and minute hands into place.  The smaller end of the key could be used in a tiny pinhole in the center of the clock face---to adjust if the clock ran too fast or too slow.  That would be determined later in the week. 

He snapped the glass door shut and then gently tilted the clock to the left, setting the pendulum in motion. The tick always began. Then, just as deliberately, he returned to his chair---the sections of the paper rustled slightly and slid a bit under his slippers.  He lit a second cigarette.   Ready for another week.  

The clock is a centenarian. Manufactured by Seth Thomas who, come to find out, was a promoter of  mass production for clocks in the nineteenth century.  Clock factories were big in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kept the industrial North running on time. 

The clock is in my house now.  My Dad’s handwriting in pencil on the back of the clock reads:  “Windsor So 10072.” Maybe a model number? No idea. The brass bezel around its glass door is tarnished. But the black Arabic numbers are still graceful against the yellowed, creamy enamel surface of its face.  I checked on eBay and found a dead-ringer going for $125. Its shiny rosewood housing surely refinished. In Flint, Gunther Gerholz found me an additional key.  I felt prepared for the future, but then Gunther’s shop closed.  We are on our own now. 

Nothing in my parents’ house was new or “store bought.” Most objects had a point of origin that provided a name. Enhanced the object in a child’s imagination.  My family called this mantel clock “the Coughlan clock.” The back story was that it had been a wedding gift to my father’s uncle, Timothy Michael Coughlan, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Cavalry.  Around 1900 Timothy Michael married Helen Gardner.  Someone gifted the couple with this mantel clock, evidently an appropriate gift for a new household. Kept domestic life orderly. 

Colonel Coughlan served in the Great War.  Afterward, the Army established regional Corps Areas across the country to facilitate future national mobilizations. Colonel Coughlan belonged to the Artillery Group, 9th Corps Area, headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco. Perhaps he had ambitions; he wrote a pamphlet entitled, “Mobilization in Retrospect,” bound in simulated leather and printed at his own expense in 1926. His family, now with four daughters, lived near the Presidio in the Richmond district in a three-story house on 16^th Avenue. Someone snapped my first baby picture on its stoop. Leaning over me is Aunt Helen, in a long-sleeved black dress, a strand of pearls dangling, the marcelled waves of her short gray hair to the camera. 

The clock must have been in the living room of that house, though I don’t recall it there.  Every year, my two cousins and I spent family Christmas celebrations roaming its upstairs floors. I remember a Prussian spiked helmet and a saber that tumbled out of a closet.  A panoramic photograph of a mounted cavalry regiment stretched across a bedroom wall.  A sewing room lined with windows that was still used. Bibelots from China, supposedly shipped home in a camphor chest after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. 

We kids ate our Christmas dinner in the breakfast room off the kitchen.  An aproned Black maid specially hired for the holiday served us turkey and grits. The grown-ups milled around the dining room; tap, swoosh, thwack went the swinging pantry doors as parents, aunts, and uncles refilled endless cocktails.  One year the turkey hit the kitchen floor, my mother said later. 

When Aunt Helen died, the last of the family belongings---long since jumbled into an apartment---were parceled out. In the 1960s suburbs with wall to wall carpeting and pastel refrigerators, who wanted an old clock you had to wind?  My Dad claimed it. He placed it on the left side of the fireplace mantel in our living room.

I carried the clock back to Michigan on a plane, swaddled in towels, in a canvas bag resting on my lap. Now it stands on the left side of my fireplace mantel.  In the beginning, I was afraid of the clock, of the dreaded “winding it too tight.”  But I’ve learned the feel of the tension, when the turns of the key have stored just enough energy to carry the mechanism through the week.  I’ve grown into the task, it seems, inherited a satisfying Sunday ritual, a weekly recollection---timely, you might say, since all the religious ones have lost their hold and fallen away.  

The strike may startle if you’ve not lived with a clock that has a mechanical movement. Overnight guests are forewarned. In this century’s electronic soundscape, its clear tone is distinctive.   In bed, I often hear the clock striking---first two, then three am; the chime floats across the darkness, separating the sections of the night, assigning each hour its number. I’m hearing the same sound heard by my dead but once sleepless parents and a generation before them as well.  If it’s Saturday night and the strikes seem slow, well, tomorrow will be time for the morning ritual.  

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How I learned to love stories

“Jesus Christ!”  I said---with heavy intonation on the first syllable.  “Jee-zus.“  I had hit the dashboard and then crumpled to the floorboard of the car.  It was a 1940’s Chevy coupe, creamy beige with a red pin stripe along the sides. Tweedy tan upholstery with slender black and red threads pressed into my face.  I was six years old. 

My mother was driving and must have slammed the brakes.  No seat belts and I was small. Not that I really remember the event, but the story was repeated so often and I knew the context so well.  It was 1951 and before growth of full-time life in the suburbs.  My mother often drove into the city (San Francisco) from the small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge where we lived.  Medical appointments on Sutter or Post Streets.  Window shopping around Union Square.  A trip to the city entailed hat and gloves, some kind of coat.  Clothing that all went together, planned for an urban appearance.   Appropriate for walking on sidewalks (no sidewalks out in the unincorporated part of the county where we lived).   Old Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat and matching hat that my mother had sewed.  And white gloves.

What always embarrassed me when this story was recounted was my spirited and easy usurpation of adult behavior.  I must have been stunned.   My head must have hurt.  Mortified in a child way to have fallen off the passenger seat in my best clothes.

My dad swore.  That’s where my startling profanity came from.   He was from New York and Irish.  A born story-teller.  Expletives regularly erupted in my dad’s language, but their range was circumscribed.  It was all theological:  “Jesus Christ,” “Jesus H. Christ,” “hell,” “damn it,” “God damn it.”  Calibrated to the occasion and never casual.  I don’t recall ever hearing him use scatological terms.  Words like “shit” or “fuck” were unthinkably vulgar.  I never learned those words until much later, in the 1960s.  

My outburst of juvenile impiety took its place on the roster of family stories.  Storytelling was important in my family.   Dinner party conversation depended on stories.  I listened.  Partially grasped words and events stretched out as if along a tightrope of suspense.  The narrator---like an acrobat, red parasol in hand--- teetered step over step, the end just in sight.  I watched the grown-ups as any weave or wobble in the narrative elicited a flutter of surprise, a gasp , or groan.  I relished the listeners’ visible anticipation---what would happen?  Development, digression, denouement, and the devious pleasure of irony, seeped into my young understanding. 

Stories held other pleasures too, I learned.   The real secret of my father’s influence was not his firecracker profanity.  It was stories he told to me at bedtime.  My father’s stories always inched their way to a hilarious climax which I anticipated with a shiver of excitement no matter how many times I had heard them.  “Tell me the one about camp,” I’d beg.  The story about camp hinged on a description of my doting New York City grandmother packing trunks for my dad Frank and his younger brother, Howard---an uncle whom I’d never met.  The two grade school boys were sent off somewhere in upstate New York for the entire summer.  Two months’ worth of clothes and socks, underwear, plus two-piece jersey swimsuits---all in neat stacks. It was the late 1920s. Camp was a ritual for city families.  For me, a kid in California, the whole idea conjured up an exotic world:  the customs of the urban East where children were dispatched annually to the countryside. 

The boys were shipped off with their trunks, as the story went.  The only activities at camp recalled in my dad’s telling were swimming in a lake and baseball.  Digressions featured my dad’s mimicking his younger brother Howard’s whining falsetto.  “Frankie’s trying to drown me!”  “Frankie’s pitching me bean balls!”  “Frankie’s trying to kill me!”  Of food, counselors, or any edifying activities, nothing.  Just two skinny city boys playing in the sunshine until exhaustion.  An older boy brushing off his younger brother always trailing along---“Aw, Howie, don’t be a pest.”  My dad’s sole reference to the wonders of nature was that the constant whir of crickets kept him awake at night.

The denouement in the camp story was the boys’ return to the city.  My devoted grandmother who had packed the trunks with such care opened my Uncle Howard’s trunk (dramatic pause):  empty---except for one old shoe and a tree stump.  No description of what was in my father’s trunk.  This story was entirely at the expense of the pest.  

My father’s stories were a special good night ritual.  He did not tell them every night, or even very often, as I remember.  Whatever were the exceptional occasions for them, I don’t know any longer. But I can see the outline of my Father on the edge of the bed, on my left side.  I can see the bed’s frame, a Jenny Lind style spooled bedstead.  My father’s face is a shadow; I cannot see his features.  But the lake glistening in summer sunshine, the shouts of the boys, a distant baseball diamond, and the empty trunk are all there.

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Community debate: moving the Flint Farmers' Market

Twelve Truisms about Moving
with gratitude to Sheldon Kopp’s Eschatological Laundry List

1.     Moving is hard

2.     It could have been done sooner

3.     Fear was part of it, from beginning to end

4.     Habit is comforting

5.     After two months, new habits developed

6.     Friends who were against the move got used to it

7.     New friends appeared

8.     Some places I left did not improve

9.      Other places I left look better now

10.     Even moves not of my own choosing turned out well anyway

11.     All the consequences of either staying or moving could not be known in advance

12.     Over time, fewer people shared my nostalgia; some moved, others died.

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Harbor Freight

My partner Dennis is an inveterate jerry-rigger.  You know what a jerry-rig is---a quick, temporary fix that sometimes ends up being permanent.  Like, when the lever on the electric tea-kettle breaks off, you just insert a chopstick.  Works perfectly.  Economical; saves a trip to Target.  Of course, you are one chopstick short for your bowls of rice, but that won’t emerge until much later.  

Jerry-riggers rely on many bits and pieces of stuff for quick fixes---usually sorted into canning jars and loose tea tins that line the back of the workbench in the basement.  But when these riches fail, Dennis reluctantly yields to the last resort: the hardware store.

Dennis used to run to Gill-Roy’s, but the closest one---on Flushing Road---closed.  Not enough business, the staff said.  Property values declined, people stopped fixing things up.  So Dennis found a new hang-out: Harbor Freight.

Harbor Freight Tools is the working persons’ tool and equipment go-to place.  It was founded in 1977 as a catalog company.  It’s still family owned (according to their website).   “At a time when average folks need to stretch their dollars as far as possible, you can count on Harbor Freight Tools to continue to deliver on our founding commitment. Every day we deliver exceptional quality tools at ridiculously low prices.”

Flint’s Harbor Freight is completely average and very dollar stretching.  It’s not the usual place for suburban weekend do-it-yourselfers.  Sometimes you’ll see them---probably sent over from the big box stores.  They look dazed and desperate as they realize they’ve entered vise and drill press land.  

Surprisingly, the Flint store is very female.   Of course, you see a lot of women in Home Depot and Lowes.  They are selecting paint colors or lighting, or bathroom fixtures.  At Harbor Freight women roam the drill bit aisles.  And what’s more, women---middle-aged women---are on the floor helping them with real tools.  Maybe years back they would have worked in the shop.  Today they work at Harbor Freight.

Compared to Home Depot or Lowes, the Harbor Freight store is small.  So small that if I call out to Dennis, he’ll hear me.   The aisles are narrow and the shelves tightly packed.  No bulky ten- foot platform ladders here.   A woman in her fifties girdled in a padded back support belt with suspenders is helping Dennis.  Her name tag says “Patti.” They stand at a side wall that’s lined with drills and circular saws.  I’m sitting on a low stack of wooden dollies.  Dennis ponders an 18 volt 3/8” cordless drill/driver versus a drill/driver that plugs in.  He says he wants the consistent power that comes with a plug in. But the cordless gives you short-time power that’s flexible.  Then, again, the plug in would need an extension cord . . .  They move along the wall; Patti drags her hand lightly across the boxes as she goes.  According to Patti, her husband favored the plug in too, but then it wasn’t handy when he needed it in hard places.  “That’s what I told him,” says Patti.  “So what’s the use of all that power anyway?”   Dennis goes for the cordless.  Patti has won.   

We go to check out.  Now comes the deal: super coupons for free items---tape measures, scissors, and small flashlights.  I have to choose.  We already have a couple of tape measures and several pairs of scissors.  I go for the flashlight; maybe we’ll have a dinner party and use them as favors. 

In Los Angeles we go to Harbor Freight too.  This one’s in Lomita, a small city in LA County that straddles Pacific Coast Highway as it winds along toward Long Beach.   Dennis needs a digital multi-meter, and then maybe some bungee cords, and there’s a bench brush on sale. Clutching his list and a sheaf of Harbor Freight ads, Dennis forges ahead.  Meantime, I hold open the front door for an older woman in glasses with a gray Dutch cut.  She pushes a cart full of stuff toward the parking lot, the crumpled tails of her checked flannel shirt flapping below her old sweat shirt.

Like the Flint store, this Harbor Freight has its own local flavor.  The Lomita mix---white, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, Native American, Black, and Pacific Islander---roams the aisles.   Young Hispanic women stock shelves, or dart into the storeroom.  Young Mexican guys in A-shirts reach top shelves with tattoo-covered arms.  Middle-aged bikers, their gray hair pulled into thin pony tails, cluster in the automotive section.  A tall, elderly white-haired man, so thin that his leather belt holds up his pants in large gathers, confers with his wife, as he methodically turns the 24 pages of ads in the monthly savings book. 

The signs over the aisles are bi-lingual.  I stand with my head tilted back and sound out “cabrestantes” (winches) and “destornilladores” (screwdrivers).   A substantial Spanish vocabulary winds around the predictable layout: power tools, bench top tools, through clasps and clamps (woodworking), to abrasives and hammers, wrenches and sockets, pliers and screwdrivers, and measuring tools.  There’s a small section of odd garden tools.  “Home Accessories” contains a wheelchair and a walker. 

At the cash register the clerk rings up customers in English and answers the phone in Spanish.   She breaks in mid-sentence to offer Dennis an Inside Track Club membership.  Everyday he’d get a new product coupon.  I panic; he declines.  

Some friends tell me Harbor Freight stuff is crap.  But at my age, a life-time warranty holds no allure.  In contrast, entertainment is priceless.  Last year toward the end of summer Dennis came home with battery powered  fly swatter he’d gotten on sale for $3.99 (reg. $7.99).  We sat on the porch in a warm twilight sipping margaritas and swinging at mosquitoes.  Can’t beat Harbor Freight.

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My Mother’s Body

The lilac in my back yard bloomed this spring for the first time since I planted it about ten years ago. In one of my early gardening attempts, I placed it on the north side of the house and too close to the foundation.  It struggled, slow growing in its sun-deprived location.  One of those plantings that should have been removed early, the longer it survived the more misbegotten it looked. It was too strong to pull out.  Each season its woody stems got taller, but its three or four branches produced only large leaves that progressed from light green to a dark, waxy green in summer.  A disappointing syringa vulgaris. My mother had been alive when the lilac went into the ground.   She died at age 91 and has been dead for four years.  And now the surprise: three clusters of blossoms have bloomed at the top of the bush where it grazes the second story---its flowers too high to reach and cut.

Other startling things happened this year.  Getting in to the shower I looked down to see my mother’s thighs. I stared, puzzled at the slack, narrow folds of flesh and the skin with a cross-hatch surface.  The body is mine, but I last saw the flaccid rippled flesh on my mother when I bathed her. Sharp-eyed mavens of female aging term such skin “crapey”.  Can this textile metaphor be apt?  I pinch the skin together in my hands and ponder.  The materials I knew as wool or silk crape made wonderful garments.  The women in my family sewed and they valued crape.  With its soft, submissive hand, the material follows the shape of the body line, comforts the flesh and bones beneath.  In silk the fabric’s complex weave does produce a crimpy surface, but I hadn’t noticed.  


I’ve gotten side-tracked from the shower and sit on the side of the tub, transfixed by my corporeality.  At the tips of my fingers I see my grandmother’s fingernails, narrow and ridged.  I grew up with my grandmother and with the curiosity of a child I observed the details of her body never thinking of it as prophetic of my own.  The ring finger on my left hand crooks slightly sideways as I remember hers did when she was old.  She’s come back to me now, fifty years after her death.  She is in my body, this body which now is becoming the body of my female elders---those to whom I was subordinate, those whom I admired and sometimes feared, those about whom I was curious, and those whom in the 1960s I could disdain.  I am them.

Come six o’clock I’ll raise a large goblet and toast these women and their bodies with red wine.  My mother's drink was scotch.  She wasn’t a connoisseur, but had moved from Dewar’s to Johnny Walker Red.  In the evening she’d pour a couple of fingers and say, at age 86, "I deserve it."  This expression repelled and puzzled me.  A year later, we moved it all---scotch bottles and “Old Fashioned” glasses, along with the chests, pictures, rugs, and clothes.  We crammed it into her one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living complex.  But suddenly the taste for liquor was gone, she said, surprised herself that this long habit of the cocktail hour---the reward of the day---had disappeared and she hardly missed it. 

My grandmother was from Kentucky and drank bourbon.  She said that the tradition was “bourbon and branch water,” a strange expression and the kind of odd phrase an observant child recalls.  Later I learned that branch water meant water from the distillery’s stream that kept the taste of the bourbon pure.  She lived to be 88 and I don’t know when bourbon stopped tasting good to her or reminding her of the South. 


My red wine libation is gentler, especially its lighter variants of pinots, Grenaches, and Syrahs.  Reassured by the diet and health experts that a daily glass is salutary, I measure the pour:  6 ounces is generous, 4 is scant.  I try to hit 5.  If I drink two glasses, the bottles go fast.  A friend is crafting a tray made of wine corks, so I feel helpful as another bottle hits the trash.  For a brief hour or so, my joints and muscles ease.  I remember my mother and grandmother with kindness.


If I am like my mother and grandmother, some twenty-five more years of life are ahead.  I’ve landed in new terrain.  As in a dream I grope intuitively among familiar details that combine strangely with foreign elements.  Like a traveler, I’ve grabbed a guidebook for the major monuments---essays and news reports on age and aging in the New York Times.  Cognizant of a major reader cohort, some Times features reassure an audience purportedly still young---the fifty, sixty, and seventy-year old well-fed and well-educated Americans.  Believers in a “shining future” promised by scientifically supported regimens of exercise, diet, and spirituality.   Relentlessly optimistic.  Other essays are darker. How to obtain care for elderly parents, deal with Alzheimer’s and cancer, broach end of life decisions? Accustomed to a sense of competence, readers seem shocked by the demands of the ancient human family.  Their online comments describe frustration and confusion with these tasks.  Worse, in the shadow of assisting our elders, we touch situations that will engulf us in a few decades.  


Grim. But the mothers in my body signal something else.  They tell me that they are there and powerful.  The burden of responsibility for my mother’s last years of life---once so heavy---has floated away, just like her taste for Johnny Walker.  Now she and my grandmother return in the startling efflorescence of an ordinary lilac, just at the time their genetic traces transform my body. Maybe a reminder of the admirable persistence of life in unappreciated and expected forms.  

 Read more personal essays in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/