I’m home this week with what I guess is a head cold, or possibly laryngitis — just sick enough to stay in bed but not so sick it’s entirely misery. The acetaminophen has wrapped the headache in cotton balls and I am in the cozy headspace in which your bone joints ping with occasional painful zings and you sound like death on the phone, while frankly almost enjoying the excuse to lie there gazing out the window mindlessly at the stillness of the front lawn and ordering your children — via handwritten messages scrawled on scraps of paper and passed like a classroom note — to prepare you a bowl of tortellini in chicken broth (if only they would comply).
My son, Teddy, is home from boarding school this week on fall break. He is suddenly over 6 feet tall and moves around the kitchen like a cat, unwilling to do what he’s told, making himself cups of tea. My muzzy-headed feeling of peace is interrupted every few minutes by the phone, which I should turn off, but won’t turn off because I am one of those cockeyed optimists who expects a phone call to bring some wonderful surprise — my daughter with good news from Penn, perhaps notification I’ve won some forgotten sweepstakes or door prize. Instead, it keeps ringing and ringing and ringing with various offers I do not want: I do not want the predatory personal-loan offers; I do not want to participate in a survey on generalized nighttime anxiety; I do not want to talk to the representative from United Healthcare about “wellness options” in Patchogue.
Last week, I committed the cardinal sin among columnists by repeating myself egregiously. Some of you may have noticed! I’m sorry. I only fully realized that I was retelling a previously told tale of my days as a ballerina in Mr. Peavy’s dance studio at Odd Fellows Hall once I’d finished writing the piece, five minutes before the deadline clock tolled, when it was too late to come up with something else. I knew I had mentioned components of this doubled-up essay (my ballet bun, my teacher and his Jean Naté After Bath Splash, and my classmate’s “apple diet”) at various instances over the six-plus years I’ve been writing this column, but it wasn’t until a nagging suspicion tapped me on the shoulder and I went back over the record to check that I realized I had fully rewritten — in detail, hitting the same structural highlight points and making the same jokes — an old one. It’s embarrassing.
I am not mentioning this slip to my daughter, because she will fear it’s evidence of early-onset memory loss, but it really isn’t. Rather than proof of forgetting, my repeating myself is an edifying illustration of how our brains work, how channels of thought are created when we retell stories to ourselves. Clearly I’ve worn a groove, through which memory flows, by reflecting back repeatedly on my days as a dancer. (I could have reported to you something new and spicy, but I did not do that because I didn’t want to be unkind to the memory of this good and elegant ghost.) Some people bore their family at Thanksgiving by always repeating the same story about how they were a football hero in ‘86; I bore my readership by revisiting the colors of my ballet tights. I’m chalking this repetitiousness up to occupational hazard and moving on.
Another topic in regard to brain function that I’ve touched on before, but not entirely exhausted — not exhausted as far as my own personal interest goes, anyway, if not in the patience of The Star’s readership — is the way certain words get misfiled and, falling through the gears of my thoughts while I sleep at night, come clattering out in the morning when I wake. I woke up this morning with the word “bayswater” on my tongue. This happens often, with different odd-lot words, an all-sorts. Bayswater. Bayswater. I’ve read that not all human beings are alike in how we think, and that we don’t all have an internal monologue running through our heads all the time, but (obviously, as my loquaciousness as a newspaper columnist makes evident) I certainly do. I cannot even imagine what it would mean to be one of those people who think in images. How do you form an argument in sequential images of cats and rocking chairs and linden trees?
Because I find these morning words quite comical, myself, I’m now going to share with you the list I’ve compiled over the last few months. Again, I promise you that this is a real list of real words I have found rattling about, stuck in my brain, not stuff I’m making up to try to be jazzy and entertaining.
Some of the words that have been there at the front of my mind when I get up to shuffle into the kitchen in search of coffee, stumbling over the actual cat (a black Halloween cat with glowing green eyes, who trips me on purpose to direct my attention to his empty breakfast and dinner bowl) have, in addition to “bayswater,” included:
Hanoverian
Eukanuba
Fibonacci sequence
Demelza
Janjaweed
Torquay
Xiphoid process
Cassowary
And diatomaceous earth.
I realize other people know what a Fibonacci sequence is; it’s one of those intellectual-y and science-y phrases (math-y?) that people toss around in emails or social media comments, like Occam’s razor and Schrodinger’s Box. But I don’t know what a Fibonacci sequence is and am childishly resisting just looking it up. What is a cassowary? I think it’s a bird? Does it have long, cranelike legs? Or is it the short, chubby one? Eukanuba is either dog food or a healthsome brown breakfast cereal. Demelza was the name of a character in the British potboiler drama “Poldark,” set in Cornwall at the end of the 18th century and starring the foxy Aidan Turner, whose facial structure reminds me of Rudolph Valentino’s, but what kind of name is that?
The reason I have never looked up any of these words that present themselves to me in the darkest hours of morning, just before I awake, is because I don’t care to know what exactly they mean. Some corner of my brain is offering them to me with a flourish as objects to be admired for their beauty, their sonorousness, absent of literal meaning. Just say it out loud: diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth. Five shushing and rhythmic syllables, landing with the solid echoing “earth.” like the sound of feet hitting the ground if you jumped out of a hayloft. I think (suspect?) that, factually, diatomaceous earth has something to do with gardens and slugs or worms, but let’s not ruin the poetry with worms, okay?
I really should be at work this morning in my office at the Presbyterian Church, but instead I am in bed looking up “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, which I read twice before, once in high school and once at Columbia under the tutelage of Kenneth Koch, the American poet.
Poetry is meaning beyond literal meaning. Keats writes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and I think the reason why I would wake thinking of the beautiful word “Torquay” is because in some corner of our gray matter, we all have the brains of poets, if only we would listen.