Category Archives: Literary

Hoops In February

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No, not that kind of hoops. Another kind.

Wednesday, February 4. I entered Walmart with the simple mission of buying hoola-hoops for a Homecoming pep rally game. So mundane. So check-it-off-the-list. A non-moment. It was cold; I was thinking ahead to the dessert I needed to make for our small group that evening and to the Julius Caesar Act II tests that needed grading. Do all of life’s big moments happen when we aren’t looking, when we are hair-in-our-face, rooting-for-the-keys, don’t-forget-crisco?

No one buys hoola-hoops in February. So the big sparkly rings in my buggy were invitations to fellow shoppers to smile, laugh, remember, demonstrate ‘hoop’ skills. It really was like a Coke commercial and I was handing out free Cokes. The hoops were irresistible!

I rode the wave of the brotherhood of man up to the checkout line and knew not that I was about to splat on life’s unforgiving beach. A woman and her daughter stood behind me in line. Like everyone else they were captivated and intrigued by the hoops. They smiled involuntarily and then the woman, off the cuff, happily, and with 5 words, redefined me.

“Are those for your granddaughter?”

Well!

Even now, sitting here, I have a bottle-neck of thoughts clumping up in the narrow channel of my writing hand, each vying for first consideration.

~I realize the ridiculous arrogance of my shock at her comment. What did I expect? Did I think I was exempt?
~Though I do not have a grandchild, of course I’m old enough to have one. I am at the extreme outer edge of my mid-40s and our oldest child is 22. That’s not what surprises me and stops me cold. It’s that I LOOK like I could have a grandchild. That one look at me pegs me for Memaw, Nana, Gigi, Gran-Gran.
~What exactly do I look like??  I know what I thought I looked like. And ‘grandmother’ wasn’t in the tag list.
~How can this have happened on a gray, February Walmart run? Can’t we be dressed up and ready for the biggies?
~We all know it’s coming, we are just never ready for the first person to actually say it out loud to us.
~This is worse than being asked if you are expecting a baby when you are not.  It might not seem like it, but an erroneous ‘When are you due?’ is an enormous compliment.  It says you are easily recognizable as one in her dewy, fertile, springy youth.  An erroneous ‘Are those for your granddaughter?’ says ‘You are a withered prune, a tumbleweed on the high plains, a bespectacled marm who conjugates verbs and nothing else.’

And then – perspective. Perspective came through the poet John Keats and from my seniors who are studying him. Keats gives us a beautiful urn with its pictured characters in the flush of a youth and beauty frozen in time, eternal.

And my brilliant students, young and beautiful, ponder and conclude: “Yes, but it’s a sterile beauty, one that never grows. It can never grow closer to the ones it loves. It can never achieve anything. It is a permanent beauty, but at the cost of growth and change. It is silent and barren.  And that’s too high a price. Beauty and eternal youth are not worth it.”

Lessons from my students and hoola-hoops in February.

Madame Director

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A student, let’s call him David, wrote the following on the board today during a word game – ‘expellion.’

Me:  That’s not a word.

David:  Who do I contact to make that a word?

After a good long laugh at the promptness of his reply, and the underlying assumption that there is one person, somewhere with that kind of authority, we proceeded to imagine the busy office of the one who decrees that a word is a word.  We envisioned giant stacks of paper on his old-timey desk, dwarves busy at filing cabinets, a secretary fielding incessant phone calls from people like us with great new words to submit for approval and inclusion in the official usage dictionary of American English.

And we all agreed that if ever a word deserved to be included, ‘expellion’ did.  Never mind that what David intended to write was ‘expelsion,’ which is also not a word, but is closer to getting at a noun form of ‘expel’ which is what he was going for.  We discussed the existence of ‘expulsion’ and agreed that there is still room for expellion as a less violent alternative.  I would rather experience expellion than expulsion any day.  And since the original word that prompted all this was ‘secretion,’ expellion sounds downright genteel and appropriate for polite conversation.

The conclusion I soon reached is that I would like to apply for the job of Director of the Bureau of Official Words (BOW).  I would like to be the paper-swamped person at the old-timey desk, because new words and new usages are so, so fun.

One example:  Dope.  When I was around six, circa 1971, my dad had a sober conversation with me about dope.  As I recall I had called my sister a dope, meaning a silly goof, but I remember that conversation as a light bulb moment that aha! words have different meanings.  Fast-forward several years – don’t do the exact math, OK? – and my 2015 college girl described her new ankle boots as ‘dope,’  ‘totally dope.’ Now I sat up and paid attention.  Her tone suggested high praise.  Note to self:  ‘dope’ is now an adjective meaning really, really good.  Duly noted.  Shortly afterward, the same daughter intensified her description of an Indian meal as ‘stupid good.’  Ahh, I said to myself, in full Director of BOW mode, ‘stupid’ is now an adverb intensifying an adjective.

So, when at school the next day one of my students complimented my socks, I utilized all my new knowledge and replied with sang-froid, “Yeah, they’re stupid dope, aren’t they?”