Whenever I ask my mother-in-law, Jean, a question that
requires only a brief, factual response, she answers with a story. I’ve even
tried to ask her yes-or-no questions, hoping to nip the inevitable onslaught of
flashbacks, flash-forwards, and breakneck pronoun shifts right in the bud. But
to no avail.
Fortunately, I’ve never had to ask her a high-stakes
question during a time of crisis, though I can imagine it clearly.
(Lard Alec arrives home to a
burning house and meets Jean in the driveway. They cough mightily and dodge
flaming debris as the scene unfolds.)
Lard Alec: Jean, where are the kids?
Jean: Well, Colton wanted to make a
house out of matchsticks and Jenna Marie said, “That’s not fair, I want to make
a house out of matchsticks, too!” And I said, “You’re too young to make a
matchstick house” and, anyway, what’s his name, Steve? The guy with the
wheelbarrow store on Logjam Road? Well, I knew he kept a bunch of
matchsticks in some old buckets out in his shed. And she, his daughter,
I forget her name—you know, she traded in the car? It’s like a Subaru but it
only has one door? Well, I got an email from her—or I thought it was
her, but I guess it was someone else sending a, whatdoyacallit, a SPOOF-mail,
and now my phone has a virus and whenever I press the on button it takes a
picture and makes a sound like an airhorn?
Lard Alec: Jean! Are the kids in the house? What room
are they in?
Jean: Well, Steve only had the one
kid—the daughter I was telling you about—but she had a son, Torrance, I
remember his name, I don’t know why (laughing). Well, he wanted
to be a tattoo artist, but he went into the soup business instead…
My other great fantasy is that she bears witness to a crime
of historical dimensions—perhaps she takes a bus tour to New York and finds
herself at the Museum of Modern Art where a pair of David Niven lookalikes, clad
in black, creep in, create a diversion, and then steal Van Gogh’s Starry
Night off the wall while everyone’s looking the other way. Everyone except Jean.
Afterward, investigators from a dozen agencies and
journalists from around the world swarm her house and ask her to just describe
what she saw.
Jean: Well, my daughter thought I
should take one of these bus trips to New York since I’ve wanted to go for…forever,
basically, and I’m always talking about seeing a show, like that one time we
saw The New Jersey Boys off Broadway. In Albany. And it was SO.
GREAT. And she said, “Don’t drive, you’ll just get lost.” So, I said, fine,
I’ll take the bus, but when I went down to the bus station to buy a ticket,
they told me they don’t schedule bus tours—that’s someone else. You have to go
through like a trip provider or something (shaking her head)? “Go ask
someone at your senior home if they know anything about bus trips to New York.”
And I talk to Jan sometimes at lunch—she’s kind of (moving her hands around
in an ambiguous but emphatic gesture), I don’t know, LOOPY. But she knows
Mike, the CEO, and Mike tells her everything, like when they’re gonna start
renovating the East Wing apartments—that’s where I live, so I want to know. But
Jan knows other stuff, too, because Mike and her are like this. “So,
Jan,” I say one day at lunch. “What’s this I’m hearing about bus trips?”
One
by one, the cameras lose power; microphones wilt; cops shuffle off with sad notebooks
full of goop.
~
One of Jean’s signature phrases is load down,
as in, “I’m going to load down some pictures from my camera onto your
computer.” If you hear this and say something reflexively pedantic like, “Oh,
you mean download?” She’ll just reply, “Yeah, I LOADED DOWN some
pictures onto your COMPUTER. Look, here’s one of Colton making a sandcastle out
of seaweed. A seaweed castle, I guess. But then Jenna Marie comes over in this
next picture and says, ‘Why does he get all the seaweed!? That’s not
fair!’”
My friend’s mother likes to say download
in place of down low, as in, “I’m keeping it on the download,” by which
she means the Q.T. Another friend’s father refers to texts as phone emails.
And my grandfather calls ESPN ESP, arthritis Arthur Itis, and HBO
Home Box. Both he and my mother-in-law refer to the regional grocery
store chain Wegman’s as Weymann’s (pronounced WHYmans). All of which is
to say that Jean, despite her peculiar facility for coughing up unsolicited rapids
of blather and brain breaking neology, is not alone.
Now, granted, people like my mother
make it well into their seventies without acquiring Jean’s or my grandfather’s
funhouse vocabularies and narrative pratfalls, so these hallucinatory
linguistic traits are not, solely, attributable to age. Jean has lived a long life
full of whirligig, context free hyper-narration, and my grandfather, despite
spending decades as an English teacher, has always been entirely too
impatient and habitually expulsive to speak in anything but his peculiar back-alley
peyote language of malapropisms and homespun solecisms. He just doesn’t slow
down enough to properly listen to anyone or think things through.
Nonetheless, it is clear that, at
some point, a merely eccentric idiom can mature, or decline, in shocking ways,
and there seems to be a point somewhere in late middle-age where linguistic
idiosyncrasies morph into new looking-glass tongues all their own. I figure I
have about 10 to 15 years before this happens to me.
For my part, I mumble, curse, and take
long pauses between words where the world turns into a gently swaying ship, and
I’m in the crow’s nest, looking for word-land, seeing nothing but sea. While
once my voice was fairly deep, it’s since grown faint, crackly, and a little
dry. I repeat myself more than I used to, and my memory is fuzzy, worn down by
fatherhood and old dodgeball injuries. By my early 60s, I might speak
exclusively in staticky bursts of forgetful profanity whenever I’m not
absolutely forced by circumstances, if even then, to act otherwise.
Should I get to this point (call it
Grandpaland, or the Isle of Jean), I will exist in a deepening privacy of
expression. I will grow increasingly adamant in my cryptic notions and turns of
phrase, wondering why everyone is looking at me that way but never bothering to
ask. I will be impenetrable and unassuageable, driving my speech before me like
a plow through miles of undifferentiated snow. It is something to watch out
for, though, of course, no one in Grandpaland knows quite where they are.
I am not talking about Alzheimer’s.
My father has that, and his speech is a broken promise, a stuttering machine
missing half its parts. It is too ghostly and whispery to revel in, even when
it is funny. Like my grandfather and Jean, he is incorrigible, but he lacks the
consistency to say the same wrong thing over and over and over again.
The great moral of my 40s is that
the dream of education, of edification, is over. Try as I might, I cannot add
any volumes to the library of my mind. Or, rather, as soon as I add one, two
others are eaten by shadows and dust. I can change, little by little, but I
will never improve. Nonetheless, I can still see myself as others see me, if
only just. But once you make landfall on the Isle of Jean, or your own version thereof, the era of
assimilation is over. You and your language become an island filled with
toppling coconuts, sun-dazed lizards, and wobbly, flightless birds. You are a
sovereign there, though you are also marooned.
Lardland will not be as lush and
colorful as the Isle of Jean, nor will it be as tetchy and gruff as
Grandpaland, a smog-choked little city of pickle barrels, butcher shops, and
mines. Instead, it will be an island with a little schoolhouse where I’m neither
the teacher nor the student, and I’m trying to figure out what to call it, the
thing I do there, and making up a new word when the old one won’t come.