September 4 Assignment

PART 1: Pondering Words

I don’t think that word means what I think it means…

Being addicted to an online version of Boggle keeps me pondering about words. I understand that one can be nude. I’m not sure how one can be nuder. How can one be nuder than nude? And poor nudiustertian. I understand that it was the fashionable way to say “the day before yesterday” for about a millisecond in 1647. Still, my first thought was that it was the formal name for a organization of individuals who met for meetings while being nude. Perhaps a religious group. Who attend church while naked. Did you ever notice that people look the least attractive while sitting upright and naked? Okay. Never mind.

I would love to see the world “bemadden” in modern usage once again. I believe, that with just a bit of effort, that we can do it, even in the 21^st century. “Every piece of technology has bemaddened me this week.” The word is like a great friend – one who doesn’t just come to visit when you’re sick but brings you the best homemade cookies. That is the extra special effort that bemadden works to add to a sentence.

“Scorse” is the next word. My search engine was determined that I had failed to spell “Scorsese” correctly and that what I really meant to search for was one of his movies or perhaps Robert de Niro. It took some convincing, but it turned out my made-up definition of cooking something until it was just short of scorched was completely wrong. Apparently, it really means to barter or trade. Hmph. Mine was better. The real definition sounds a wee bit unimaginative.

What happens, however, after I play too much Boggle, is that I stop recognizing words I actually know. “Empanada” caught me this week. I was making up definitions and then I remembered I loved eating empanadas when I lived in New Mexico. Once, I even fell for an advertisement (live in hope, die in despair, right?) for an empanada maker. It didn’t work well. Or perhaps I should say that I couldn’t make it work well. What I don’t understand is why they haven’t taken off as a frozen food aisle item. It seems like Nestle, who makes Hot Pockets, should be falling all over themselves to get these tasty meat turnovers on our grocery store shelves. I need to stop and send them an email.

PART 2: The Beginnings of a Story

“Leftovers” is a story I’ve been thinking about these past few days. It is about the loved ones of average people who get killed when they accidentally learn about national security threats, and how an odd grouping of the survivors decide to prove the government is behind the deaths. For their headquarters, they use a local café where the regulars both scoff at and help them collect information.

Lucy, an ordinary young woman, has her life thrown off track when her parents and little brother are killed in a car accident. Also killed in the accident was Antonio Felix Sanchez, a notorious drug cartel leader. After the funeral, a man, barely older than herself, with curly red hair, hands her what she thinks is a sympathy card. She adds it to the pile, and doesn’t read any of them for several days. Finally, early one morning, she sits on the couch and to the sole accompaniment of a noisy clock, begins reading through them. She nods at one, and cries a bit at another. Opening the card one from the red-haired man, she gasps at the words: “It wasn’t an accident. I will be at the corner of Jefferson and Highland at 8am every morning for the next week if you are interested in searching for the truth.” Glancing at the clock, she realizes that the appointed time is nearly two and half hours away. She tries to tell herself that she won’t go. That took up about three minutes of the wait. She dresses, straightens the house, and pretends to watch TV before giving up and still leaving nearly an hour early. 

Expecting to wait, she felt a bit of a shock when she saw the man. He smiled at her approach. “Nelson said you’d never come, but I was right! Here you are!” She stopped. “No, don’t worry, I’m not a crazy guy,” he tried to reassure her. “I’m Tom Ettinger, a grad student in biology at MU. Well, I was. Maybe you heard about my dad? He was the worker who was killed, along with five would-be terrorists, when the Walker Substation blew up last year.”

Lucy knew then she had made a mistake to come. He was a conspiracy theorist. She began looking for the best way to leave, happy that the intersection was becoming more crowded with people heading to work. She could walk to the corner market, and call a taxi, if need be. It wouldn’t help much since the guy knew where she lived.

“You had Professor Nelson for Quality Management, right? When he left, Professor Ingles took over your class? Professor Nelson is part of our group,” he enjoined her. She looked back to Tom. Professor Nelson had taken leave when his daughter had been killed in an apparent murder-suicide pact with her boyfriend. “The two of us would like you to join us for breakfast at Roy’s Cafe.”

Breakfast at Roy’s? Roy’s was known for laborer-sized servings of breakfast foods in direct contrast to the filly décor that had never made it out of the 1980s. She hadn’t been there in years. At least she was out of the house. Her family’s house. Their house. And she would be surrounded by people if this went badly. She found herself slowly nodding.

PART 3: The Rebel Essay

[Simultaneously published on my personal blog and on Facebook, where I have a dedicated following (of three people) who read my Sunday essays between coffee and having a real life. I should rename my blog “Mental Break”. I’m sure that’s taken, but I’ll check anyway.] 

This week I was a rebel. I took a load of towels out of the dryer and set them on top of the dryer. And I left them there. For two and half days. If you truly know me (and don’t you just wish), you know this an extremely rare occurrence. Every day, I went to the closet and got out a properly folded towel, forgetting about the crumpled load on the dryer. Finally, the closet was empty and I had to retrieve one from the terry cloth lump. I worked to convince myself that wrinkled towels weren’t all that bad. And I had saved time, at least the few minutes usually spent in folding. So I smiled at this tiny triumph. And then it happened. I took a pair of socks out of my black sock drawer (yes, black socks and blue socks get their own drawers), put them on and discovered they were blue. I felt the disorientation that comes in knowing that the universe had been disrupted. My me. Being short of time, I continued to wear said blue socks even though I wore black pants with black shoes, further unsettling the universe. (Yes, your honor, I knew it was risky.)

At work, a group of us went to Pizza Hut for lunch. Initially, it appeared as if the trip were uneventful. A few hours later there was a Facebook post on our local news page. “Did you eat lunch today at Pizza Hut between 11:30 and 12:45?” What? Was one of our cars hit and we just hadn’t noticed? That happened to me in high school. Someone had creamed the passenger side of my car in the parking lot and it took me a week to notice. My parents, however, had received a phone call right after the accident and were waiting for me to say something. Day after day after day.

“If so, do you drive a white car?” the news post continued. One of my friends does indeed drive a white car. “And if you said yes again, have you looked in your trunk only to find a microwave you had no idea about?” Huh? My white-car-driving friend ran out to her car, lifted the trunk lid and there was indeed a rogue microwave oven lounging there. It turns out that it was intended for the poster’s daughter, delivered by a friend and accidentally put into the wrong vehicle. So, while we were blithely eating lunch, someone got into her car (her doors don’t lock), popped the trunk and put this bigger-than-a-breadbox item in it. And we didn’t have a clue. Funny. Yet completely creepy. This (and any other oddities) of those few days are, of course, entirely my fault because I disrupted the universe by leaving the towels on the dryer. When I came home, I immediately folded the towels, so here’s hoping the universe can right itself and that you find nothing unusual in your trunk.