Nuptial Vowels

My husband is an English professor; my father almost became one; and my mother was a high school English teacher. I have always been surrounded by people who care about language. A beautiful sentence, a lovely turn of phrase, these are the things that could make their day. But above all else, each of them had a reverence for clarity. They knew that with clarity comes grace.

Last night I posted an ad on Craigslist. I uploaded the photo of my daughter’s bike, wrote a quick description and tapped out a headline: Pink Girl’s Bike For Sale. I hit “publish” and then clicked on the published ad. I gasped. It read as though the bike was for pink girls. Frantically, I found the edit button and rewrote the headline: Girl’s Pink Bike For Sale.

I keep my mother’s paperback copy of Strunk and White here on my desk. I don’t refer to it very often (I know I should.). It’s more of a talisman and a way of keeping my mother, who died twenty years ago, close to me. Just now I flipped through it looking for inspiration on the topic of clarity. My mother usually underlined favorite passages, but this book she treated the way the devout treat their bibles and Korans, unblemished by ink. In the entire book she underlined only one word: Interesting. Strunk wrote: “An unconvincing word…” I laughed when I saw the underlining. Back in the seventies, when I was a teenager, my mother and I were in the beauty salon (that’s what she called it) and a woman came in with a new baby. A hideously homely, horrid-looking thing (we’ll do another posting on alliteration, and stay tuned for our domestic harmony being upset when we discuss my overuse of parenthetical asides.). The new mother looked expectantly at my mother. “Why, what an interesting baby you have there,” my mother said to her, smiling broadly.

Later, outside the salon, my mother turned to me. “Interesting is an all-purpose word. You can use it when you don’t want to tell the truth but you don’t want to lie. It lacks clarity, which can be a good thing in the case of commenting on ugly babies.” I’m quite sure at the time I rolled my eyes, ever resistant to her constant attempts at linguistic proselytizing. And so, Mom, the message has stuck after all. Above all, clarity matters. Except when you’re avoiding it.

–Barbara

Several weeks ago, our eleven-year-old daughter uttered the words I have been fearing for years: I think I might be a writer when I grow up.

The dining room started to swirl, I thought I might throw up. Magic Teacups Ride vertigo-induced throw up. Really. I thought you wanted to be an interior designer, I managed to utter as I reached for my Merlot, the nausea eclipsed now by the full head-on anxiety attack.

She shook her head as if to say, that’s so fifteen minutes ago.

A teacher? I tried, You are so good with little kids.

Nope.

A cheese critic? Remember how you wanted to be a cheese critic? She actually called it “cheese taster.”  Or have your own cheese shop in Paris?  

She wrinkled her nose. Not any more. I want to be a writer. Why can’t I be a writer? You’re a writer. Don’t you think I’m a good writer?

Of course you’re a good writer, Sweetheart, I started. It’s just that the writing life can be a hard life. I stared out across the dining room through the patio glass sliding door, into the woods behind our house, lost in my ennui, mumbling. A life full of rejection, hopelessness, futility—

Despair, my husband chimed in. Frustration…

Maybe I’ll write about this in our blog, I said to Dennis, downing my wine. The underbelly of the writing life.

Yeah, you could chronicle my suicide, Dennis said, momentarily lifting himself out of his depression to reach energetically for the Merlot bottle. He had spent the day correcting the footnotes of his 99,919-word manuscript, per the publisher’s instructions.

We were talking just to each other now. Two writers trying to outdo each other on the misery scale. We forgot this conversation was supposed to be about Sasha. We had moved on to dreaming about what we could have been.

A forest ranger, Dennis said dreamily. He had taken a Myers-Briggs test decades ago that said he would be well-suited for that life. I always wondered if it was his love of nature or his aversion to conversation that culminated in that conclusion.

A dog whisperer, I said. I love dogs. Never mind that our dog won’t heel or come, and only sits for treats, sometimes.

Sasha was strategically ignoring us now. No offense, she began. “No offense” is her favorite phrase this year. It’s usually followed by something highly offensive. I steeled myself.

But I’m going to be a successful writer. She lingered over the word successful.

My mouth dropped open, just like a cartoon character. Picture Olive, Popeye’s gal.

Honey, we want you to be whatever you want to be. If being a writer will make you happy, be a writer.

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Tonight, a few weeks after the Magic Teacup scene, Sasha announced she does, in fact, want to be an interior designer. I felt relief but also a little pang of sadness.

If I had it to do over again, would I still be a writer? Is it a choice or a compulsion?

We went to see Julie and Julia a few days ago. While other people laughed when Amy Adams had her meltdowns, setbacks, and feelings of failure, I cried. Big, fat crazy tears of empathy.

 MUDTHER, our daughter who was sitting between the two of us whispered in the theater, Why are you crying? No one else in this entire theater is crying.

I was embarrassed. The tears wouldn’t stop. It’s hard to discreetly wipe your tears on your tank top.

When we got out of the theater I felt I had to explain myself: That movie was about writing and challenges and persistence, following your dream in the face of failure…. My daughter looked at me.

It’s okay, Mom, she said, with pity in her voice. It’ll be okay.

I know. I’m happy I’m a writer—successful or not. No offense.

-Barbara

Judy wrote to ask why “just deserts” is spelled “just deserts” and not “just desserts.”

It’s a good question, and it’s a common mistake. After all, it is pronounced as if it were spelled “desserts,” and half the time this spelling seems to make sense. A dessert is a kind of reward, something we get after slogging through our lima beans and over-cooked liver, so when we hear that someone we know, after being passed over for promotion for years for much less deserving candidates, at last was made vice president, we say to ourselves, “Well, at last she got her just desserts.”

But what about,  “When Bernie Madoff was sentenced to  150 years, he got his just deserts.” That doesn’t make much sense, unless, of course, you’re irredeemably post-modern and everything is ironic.

In fact, the “deserts” in “just deserts” has nothing to do with “desserts.” The word comes from the Old French deserte, from the past participle of deservir, meaning to deserve. Hence, someone who gets their “just deserts” gets what he deserves. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was adopted into English sometime in the 1300s.

By the way, I was born and raised in the high desert of California. Besides famished jack rabbits, comatose horny toads, and an occasional clump of parched sage or a lone Joshua tree, nothing else lived there. It was insufferably hot in the summer, and a dry, maddening wind blew continually. It tormented us all, the good and the bad alike. I can say, with some authority, that there is no just desert.

-Dennis