Monday, March 21, 2011

It was a LOUD bird

Have you ever had a word or idea that you rolled around on your tongue like a chocolate - tasting the sound, thinking about the flavor? A true pronouncement. Last night my 20 month old grandson (with some coaching from his parental unit) was telling me about his day. He went to the Baltimore Aquarium and saw ----- fish - red fish, orange fish, blue fish and a LOUD BIRD. Loud is a word that requires scrunching up your face and rolling your tongue in your mouth and saying LOUD bird. It is a lucious word. He says it with all of the passion and energy of someone making a pronouncement on the future of the world and once he is done he sits back and laughs as if there is no better word in the world for what there is to see and experience.

Children - mine and others - coin phrases that rattle around in my head as the small kernels of truth that come back to ground ideas. Years ago my youngest sister became famous as the pronouncer of truths. We stayed at a resort in Ocean City that was next door to a motor court of little mention named Miami Courts. Once day when she was little and I not yet a teenager were walking back from a foray to the corner store, I said something about cutting through the parking lot and she looked up and said with all of the seriousness of a toddler -- are we going to Your Ami? As the years have gone on I have always remembered her confusion with the syntax of the english language and the fraility of puns. She is also the authoress of my other favorite quote from her years of horseback riding. She came home one day in a thorough funk and proclaimed at dinner that Dusty would not behave for a little jerk. Of course she meant that Dusty the horse was not responding to the reins - but forever her pronouncement has stayed in my thoughts as not responding to a little jerk. I can not tell you how many times that phrase has come back to me to explain what was going on in life. Is the problem the Little Jerk or the little jerk? The third one -- bear with me - was an Easter joke. In a spurt of craftieness I though that I would let my youngest child help me create Easter Eggs. I made all of the preperations - eggs, dye, stickers - and called him to help. His pronouncement to his siblings was they should all come help -- we were going to Kill Eggs. Ahhh english as a language.
For those of you who are dyslexic or who don't hear the fine nuance of words and phrases this will be funny. For everyone else you will go "Huh". This was an inside joke for all of us on the ADHD/Dyslexic list serve.

1 comment:

suebm said...

Thanks for the chuckles, and the belly-laughs. One of my lovely nieces gave me one that I'll carry to the grave. She was safely strapped in her car seat while my sis drove to God-knows-where. Carol, who always tried to be a good mom, said "Oh look Anna, there's a taxi. And there's a tow truck!" Then Carol glanced in the rear view to see Anna, shoe & sock off, twisting her big toe and looking perplexed. "Toe truck?" she said.

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