In the spring of 1999, I graduated from Western Michigan University with a master’s degree in English with emphasis on profession writing. That final semester, I produced a staggering number of essays, proposals, position papers and more. My life was split in two, vertically. Monday through Thursday, I lived in a small apartment in Portage, attended and taught classes, and spent hours writing at an old Acer computer on a card table. After my final class got out at 9 p.m. Thursday, I drove straight through to Alpena to spend my weekend with my husband and son. This is an except from my a memoir I submitted on Feb. 25, 1999.
Lexicology: A Memoir of Words
I kept a pile of books in the corner of my childhood bedroom within easy reach of my single bed. Two walls painted a shade of the blue sky propped up the three-foot stretch of glossy-coated romances, a rainbow of color — red, white, purple, teal, and green — against the blue. My favorites were Harlequins, and I inhaled them like smoky incense, breathing in their stories. “I was raised on romance,” I tease my oh-so pragmatic husband today. Perhaps more honestly, I escaped my adolescence in those stories, a book propped up on my pillow. In my favorite romances my glasses never sat crookedly on my face, pimples never appeared on my chin, and I was never without a date at the school dance. No, I was a governess for a wealthy recluse on an island in Italy. Or a companion for some troubled child who had lost her mother in a tragic car accident. Or a professional editor working with a difficult author who refused to leave his estate in Greece. And I always managed to fall in love.
The stories branded my brain. Many mornings I woke to find sentences printed backwards on my forehead after falling asleep reading and my fingertips black from the ink that smeared from the pages. Words like love, passion, and kiss became part of my vocabulary and I learned how they fit into whole sentences. Naturally my first attempt at a novel was a romance. I wrote it longhand in pencil in a spiral notebook with a fuzzy sailboat on the cover. I consulted my set of Childcraft encyclopedias to make sure I had the details of setting right. Yes, Colorado Springs was at the base of Pikes Peak. Yes, Candlestick Park was in San Francisco. Daily I scribbled away — on the bus, in my classes, late into the night.
* * * * *
In high school, my English teacher and I cracked heads over her grammar lessons.
“You can’t say that: Everyone should bring his book,” I read the sentence she had written on the board with my favorite simpering voice. “Nobody talks that way and it sounds stupid!”
Ms. Leigel stared at me open-mouthed while her red hair bobbed in agitation. Nothing in her 20 years of teaching prepared her for my mouth, the words that spilled out of me. I could see the confusion in her bony face, watched her hands twitter that anyone would be so blunt, so contradictory. Irritation flashed across her face, and she opened her mouth to respond. Then she remembered where she was and the other faces in the room. She smiled sarcastically and hid behind the grammar book open on her desk.
“Of course that’s the way it is, Colleen. The pronoun must agree with the noun antecedent.” She carefully circled the pronoun his and drew an arrow back to the one in Everyone. “One person is a his, not a they. If you had read the assignment for today, you would have known that.”
“Well you’ll never get me to write that way,” I retorted. “EveryONE will think I’m a fool and don’t know how to write. And I DID read the assignment.”
She gave me an “A-” and carefully added up the points I lost for refusing to learn her lesson in noun-pronoun agreement. She couldn’t overlook the “knack” I had for stringing words together in “pleasing combinations,” as she so often wrote on my weekly themes.
* * * * *
During my junior and senior years of high school, Ms. Leigel was granted a reprieve. I took two hours every semester of journalism instead of American literature and started writing things that mattered to me. I started telling stories, stories about people who were real and hadn’t lived hundreds of years ago. I wrote about a boy dying of cancer who, after losing his left arm, still found a way to repair his car engine. I wrote about the boys swim team and the girls volleyball team. I earned the nickname Ms. Sports Illustrated because I was at every basketball game burning miles of film under the backboards, hoping for that one photograph that would be sharp enough to print.
When the school paper didn’t have enough room for my stories, I went to the local community weekly. And I learned more words — paste up, half-tone, banner headlines, grip-and-grab shots. And I learned about truth in a small town. When Mr. D— didn’t want a story run about the break-in at his store, it didn’t run. He was, after all, one of the biggest advertisers. I hadn’t yet read Nat Hentoff or learned the words freedom of the press. Those words were yet to be discovered.
* * * * *
Very little in my life prepared me for my first professional assignment as a police reporter. I entered drug houses with my pants tucked in my socks so cockroaches wouldn’t crawl up my legs. I didn’t turn away when cops carried out babies wrapped in coarse blankets. I learned to talk to people who had family members killed in brutal murders and bloody accidents. They had stories to tell, and I encouraged them to talk, letting their own words illuminate their losses. I was prepared for the child who killed his best friend while playing with a shotgun. Sitting at my computer minutes before deadline, their words spilled out of me, through me — loss, tragedy, death and crime.
One Sunday morning, I opened the paper to the metro cover and three out of four stories carried my byline: the children who had taken up a funeral collection for their friends who had been killed earlier in the week by a train while playing on the tracks; the study that showed the housing market in Lansing was closed to minority couples; and the train derailment in a neighboring county. I had filled a whole page with words that meant something. I celebrated and slept that night with the page on my pillow, smearing newsprint all over the crisp sheets. I didn’t care.
* * * * *
I married a man raised on numbers, not words like me. Life, for him, can be reduced to a geometric equation balanced on both sides of the equals sign. He measures success in the number of zeros in his paycheck and the number of dollars of roadwork he oversees. When we fight, he argues in numbers while I yell the words I’ve learned throughout my life. It is a strange pairing, one that defies his logical equations. I once convinced him to read a whole novel, something he had never done in six years of college. He taught me to balance my checkbook, but I cheat and use the calculator. He still orders magazines with pictures, like Country and Western Horseman. He is tall and lean; I am short and chunky. Our pairing is like a cliche written a million times, a cheap gimmick I found in my romances as a child.
He has taught me more words that I never would have known had we not married — commitment, honor, logic, and reason. We’ve given up trying to change each other. He will never be the strange recluse who brings fresh flowers every morning to his daughter’s governess. He will never dance a tango in a tropical garden. He’s much more likely to take me a rodeo or teach me the unique chemical composition of soil rich enough to grow sweet corn. He can’t even dance a two-step. But he taught me about love and trust in ways that books could not.
* * * * *
Words failed me when my son was born. The strange alchemy that created his maleness from my female body didn’t have a word. Miraculous never seemed adequate. Instead I have learned to marvel in a new language, that of intuition, of sensation, of sound and smell. The feel of a child sleeping in the crook of my left arm. The pitch and tenor of his night cry. The warm scent of his skin as he is sleeping. I have learned to listen and not speak, to let other means of communication guide me as my son grows.
And I learned how our child combines his father’s logic of numbers and my play of words. Ethan dreams of flying in outer space, discovering a new planet, or naming a comet that has never been seen before. He uses a telescope to line up complex mathematical coordinates to locate the planets visible from our backyard and then writes a story about how Scooby-Do rescues the astronauts lost in the space shuttle. He sits at the table with his dad working on double-digit subtraction.
At eight he is not too large to snuggle on my lap as we read a book together, him reading the even pages, me reading the odd. We giggle loudly when he gets a word wrong. I purposely change the character’s name to Ethan.
“Mom!” he says, using the tone of voice that every parent has heard from a child. It’s the tone that says: You’re being really silly and I’m pretending that I don’t like it, but I really do.
“What does that mean?” he points to a word and wraps his lips around the mouthful of letters. “Literature.”
“It’s really, really good writing, words that everyone wants to read.”
Image from Flickr Creative Commons: LMRitchie’s Photostream
I finally got a chance to watch “Spotlight” this weekend. As a former police reporter, I sympathized with the Boston Globe team’s anguish over the impact of the story, their loss of faith and their empathy for the abuse victims.
Writer and Raconteur 