A few months ago I signed up to get Merriam-Webster’s Word-of-the
Day delivered to my e-mail box. The idea was to build my vocabulary and I had
planned to use a new-to-me word in each blog entry. That didn’t work out. Although
I still read, listen to and study each daily word, I’ve only used two of them
in my own writing. Today is my third attempt and the word is ‘holus-bolus’
which means “all at once.” The example they gave was this: “If you shout your
questions at me holus-bolus, instead of asking them one at a time, then I won't
be able to hear any of them.” The minute I read that word I thought of Mary
Oliver. I think she’d like ‘holus-bolus.’ I’ve been reading her book titled, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to
Understanding and Writing Poetry.” I bought it because I have a secret
desire to write poetry and because everywhere I go lately Mary Oliver’s name
shows up. Even Hillary Clinton mentioned Ms. Oliver in her new book, What Happened. (I’m reading both books
at the same time. Well, alternately but wouldn’t it be cool if we could read
one book with one eye and another book with the other eye? Think how much
smarter we’d be if we could maximize our reading time like that.)
Mary’s book starts out with gobbly-goop about the alphabet
of familiar sounds. Vowels and consonants and semivowels and mutes. Oh, my! She writes
stuff like, “In this run of short i sounds,
the i used as part of a diphthong (in
‘their,’ ‘coin,’ ‘eerie,’ and ‘fusion’) is not a part of the assonance proper; neither,
of course, is the long i in ‘spinal.’
But the y sound in the word ‘crystal’
is.” If I have to understand gobbly-goop like this I’ll never learn how to
write poetry. It doesn’t help that I never learned how to sound out words. Still can’t. But I can still remember
the opening line to a poem I wrote in high school: “Oh, how I hate to sit at
home and rack my brain to write a poem.”
Hillary’s book is much easier to understand. In the early
pages she wrote about how she reread one of her favorite books after the
election, The Return of the Prodigal Son. She quotes the author, Henri Nouwen’s, lesson
of the parable of the Prodigal Son---“I can choose to be grateful even when my
emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. I can choose to
speak about goodness and beauty even when my inner eye still looks for someone
to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that
forgive and to look at the faces that smile even while I still hear words of
revenge and see grimaces of hatred.” Hillary says Nouwen’s “discipline of
gratitude” to her means that having gratitude for the good things isn’t enough,
that’s too easy. She says we need to be grateful for the hard things too
because, “in the end, they make us stronger…. My task, “she wrote, “was to be grateful
for the humbling experience of losing the presidential election. Humility can
be such a painful virtue.” Personally, I don’t know how she ever got out of bed
let alone go through the cathartic process of writing a book and going on a
book tour.
This week I finally got into the ears, nose and throat doctor. He
was running nearly an hour late but it was worth the wait to have him find a
ball of gobbly-goop---I love those words---in my ear made up of blood, dead skin and wax. He suctioned
it out and wrote me a prescription for ear drops for the infection left behind.
Afterward I rushed home to meet with a contractor I found on Home Adviser, a franchised
service called Handyman Connections. I had a piece of siding in the peak of my
garage, that had fallen off and it required a fifteen foot ladder to put it
back on. I only have a two step ladder lest I’d be tempted to do anything farther
off the floor than that. He was ten minutes late and he got the job done in
fifteen minutes but it could have been done in ten if a family of wasps
hadn’t built their nest on the vacated space left behind when the shingle fell
off. Ninety-five dollars and I was glad to pay it since two other near-by siding
companies I contacted didn’t even bother to respond.
When I think of all the ‘honey-do’ projects like the shingle job that my
husband did for us, his mother, my parents, the neighbors and other people who
knew he always had the right tools for any job, I realize how under-appreciated
he and most handy husbands are. Handyman Connections earned extra bonus points
because I didn’t have to nag the guy to get the work done in a timely manner and
he picked up after himself and that can’t be said about all handy husbands.
What more could I have asked for on a bright, sunny day? Well, I could ask for
my husband back but we all know that’s not the way the world of wishes works.
(Did I just write an assonance at the end of that last sentence? Mary has me so
confused!) ©
“In this universe
we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question.
Which are, at the
same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.”
Mary Oliver
