Writings
Like a lot of people I know, my mother stopped going to movies several years ago….shortly after Howard Keel stopped singing to Kathryn Grayson. Too much sex and violence, she said. Too many dirty words, she said. And too few happy endings, she said. She wanted happy endings….thus ensuring that she would leave the theater feeling better than when she walked in. Which may be an oversimplification of her position on the matter. But not by much.
So I told big bully Billy Brisbois that I was not afraid of him, when he cornered me on the playground of Noble School. But I was. Afraid of him, that is. But either I hid it well, or he had bigger fish to fry that day….meaning that I escaped a beating by my bluffing (something that has served me well on any number of occasions, since). “Don’t let them see or smell your fear,” they told me….with reference to both animals and enemies. So I didn’t. Still don’t.
What do you say to someone when you are angry at them? I mean, really angry, and you want to reach into your arsenal of weapons for words that will hurt as they hit and poison as they penetrate. If it’s a marriage, you can always drop the “D” word. That usually gets attention. And if it’s not a marriage, there are words that begin with letters other than “D,” but I won’t enumerate them here. My favorite way of venting my spleen is with the “G” word….as in “grow up”…. “are you ever going to grow up?”….or “come back and talk to me when you decide to grow up.” It really gets to people when you question their maturity. It really gets to me when anybody questions mine.
In the home where I was raised, a very small yard was dominated by a very large tree. Every other year the tree produced apples. But we seldom, if ever, ate any. That’s because they were never any good. Some were bruised. Most were malformed. And virtually all of them housed worms. If you had patience (and a good paring knife), you could turn a bushel of them into a quart and a half of applesauce. But that, and a week’s worth of blossoms, were about all the tree was good for. Fruit farmers we were not. Had we wanted good fruit from the tree, we would have taken better care of the tree. But, as I remember it, we never thinned it, never trimmed it, and never sprayed it. And the effort we didn’t expend was reflected in the reward we didn’t receive.
