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Two Words & A Hundred Meanings
ReplyDeleteThere are 28 separate words for snow for people who live in perpetual winter.
There are two words for everything if you are my grandmother after her stroke.
"Oh, boy," she says when my mother brings her cinnamon toast and tea.
"Oh, boy," she says, frightened, as my mother holds the tea mug to her lips.
"Drink," my mother says. "Chew."
My grandmother drinks and chews and then looks up at my mother and smiles.
She is a good patient and rarely complains.
Her complaints are wrapped up in those two words: oh, boy
"Oh, boy," she whispers when she wakes up earlier than the rest of us.
"Oh, boy," her voice raises.
Those two words mean she won't be able to hold it much longer.
"Oh, boy," this means I don't want you to have to clean up after me.
My room is next to my grandmother's.
I am 29 years old and I have studied three languages.
I am not a trained linguist
but as of today there are over a hundred meanings for "oh, boy."
I walk into my grandmother's room and
with her eyes she tells me to raise the hospital bed.
A Red Sox game plays on her small Zenith radio.
It is the bottom of the sixth inning
Clemens is at bat and the bases are loaded.
I realize I am holding my breath because my grandmother is holding her breath.
And he makes it. He hits it outside the Green Monster. The crowd is wild.
The room vibrates like she's at Fenway
even though she's in my mother's guest bedroom,900 miles away.
"Oh, boy," she says.
"Oh, boy," she cheers.
"Oh, boy."
Catherine Powers
November 2013
Copyright 2013
Graduation: 1974
ReplyDeleteAnd,
although I wasn't particularly anxious to go,
it wasn't hard to do,
to move on,
to leave the address
at which I'd spent
six hours a day
for the last
four years
Later,
I realized I'd written the word "address".
Not "building"
or "school"
or "friends"
Occasionally,
I would drive by - I do drive by - the old place
and let the ghosts
talk to me:
"You're right,"
one of them says
good-naturedly,
replying to my
"I told you I can't dance"
(are you still singing?)
or,
being fresh (do we still use that word?)
and getting slapped
outside the typing room.
It was worth it.
(did you finish the PhD?)
or,
constantly being called for "traveling" (whatever that was)
the one time I tried out
for the basketball team
(an early lesson
that my future in sports
mainly involved tickets,
hot dogs, and beer)
But,
the capsule separated successfully and its trajectory
my trajectory
was vastly enhanced
by those
small-but-necessary
course corrections
- Mike Fedel
December, 2013