Tag: grammar

HELP!

See the skinny fir tree.  See the board propped up against its trunk?  It has been a year and a half since we pulled up the adolescent fir from where it had grown and moved it to the present spot, a place much in need of a native fir after we removed four large Leyland cypresses.  We held hopes for our new open space, hopes to reforest with native trees, primarily firs, and we planted at judicious spacing some small ones before pulling up this teenager and plopping it in place where it soon leaned over as if mourning the move.  Thus, we propped a board against the trunk to help it continue reaching for the sun, then packed compost around the roots, and waited over an unusually cold winter, while the branches shed their needles, leaving us to ask in February whether the tree survived.  Now rainy April and sunny May have arrived.  At the tree’s crown, a fan of fresh green needles waves brightly.  The tree is alive!  We can already imagine its prominence among the other native vegetation on the hill.  How satisfied we feel in helping the tree survive.

Ten years ago, when I began writing this blog about Thoughts After Seventy, I had thoughts to examine about what it means to be elderly.  What are my needs?  Almost immediately the answer came to me, “I need to be needed,” and so I wrote about a septuagenarian’s wish to be relevant, to be helpful.  That remains true after turning eighty, but today I find myself struggling with HELP.  Human interaction is not the same as propping up an adolescent tree, as metaphorically pleasing as that sounds. 

Whom might I help?  Who wants my help?  Who would eschew my help regardless of my good yearning-to-support-you intentions? In the grocery store a child wedges the shopping cart between a display of paper towels and laundry detergent.  His mother tugs at the cart to avoid tumbling paper towels in the aisle.  Her child squeals, “No, mine!  I can do it.” I hand a packet of carrot seeds to my grandson for spacing in a hoed furrow.  Weeks later, carrots emerge in a tight fist of orange spikes from spilled seeds.  He planted them “his way.” 

How can I be helpful if my help is not requested?  What skills or knowledge do I have at this point in my life that would be helpful to share with others?  Well, there are all those years teaching high school English.  I know the difference between subjective and objective pronouns, not to mention usage distinctions between lie and lay or less and fewer.  On occasion, friends and family ask for my help in editing their writing to check for standard usage.  I feel fulfilled by helping out. On other occasions, I see writing from friends and family that could use pronoun clarification or a punctuation tweak.  Their writing may come my way by a shared email, a letter, or even their own blog posts. I commonly note in their writing when a verb is separated from its object by intervening words, a writer will use a subjective rather than an objective pronoun; for example, “The coach chose my brothers and I,” for the team.  The writer would never write “The coach chose I,” but since brothers comes between verb and object, the writer doesn’t hear the verb crying out for an objective pronoun, and the writer uses I instead of “The coach chose my brothers and me.”  I confess here, that “errors” in English usage are like little missiles exploding in my English-teacher brain. I have yet to faint from a cerebral bleed. Would I be helping others with a little pronoun lesson?

In search of an answer, I asked my husband and three friends what I should do.  They were unanimous is saying, “Do nothing.”  You don’t “correct,” “teach” (whatever euphemism you choose ) someone’s grammar/usage without being invited to do so.  It will be felt as judgmental.  Even if I don’t feel as if I am judging?  Makes no difference – it will be felt as judgmental.  Should I ask friends, “Would you like my help with your English usage?”  Nope. That sounds patronizing.  With a granddaughter I might get away with it.  I read my granddaughter’s exquisitely written introduction to a book she is writing.  Noting some uses of semi-colons and colons, I asked if she would like my help. “Thanks, Nana, but I am not ready for line edits yet.”  Perfect.  Both of us felt good.

“Help” is circumstantial.  Having confessed that at my age I want to be needed, perhaps I am offering help where it is not desired because of my own wish to feel relevant and useful, long after I have left a classroom where I was employed to promote pronouns.  I am at an age where I will be asking for help more than providing it.  A call to my daughter or grandchildren for computer/ internet assistance is a diurnal request.

It’s all in the Beatles, Help.  In the first few lines, help and need are paired.  A few lines later age comes in:

When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody’s help in any way
(Now) but now these days are gone (these days are gone)
I’m not so self assured .

To be able to help someone adds to our self-assurance, a kind of “I can do it” feeling when there are so many things I cannot do – such as open a jar of pickles or even the tops of pill bottles. 

Recently, I checked in with a friend back East whose husband is coping with age-related health issues.  She assured me that over-all he is doing fine, but last week he stumbled over a curb in the grocery parking lot and fell.  “I didn’t even have time to call for help,” she said.  “Within seconds there were four men by his side, helping him to his feet.”  We agreed, people can be instinctively helpful.

Is anyone out there stumbling over their pronouns or prepositions?  Would you want my help?

COLLECTING PHRASES

                  Speaking with my older brother last week, he offered me, “Father winds the clock.”  The phrase set him thinking, and since his sharing it with me, the phrase is following me around like a dust mote that could be brushed off my shoulder if I would take the time.  Then last weekend when my grandson was visiting from college for spring break, we got to discussing movies.  I opined that I liked mysteries, more or less, sometimes less “more” than other times depending on the plot.  He laughed at more or less, took out his cell phone and wrote down the phrase in his Notes app.  In that app are hundreds of phrases that have intrigued him and for which he may someday find use, such as in naming a film script he is writing.

                  Words and phrases invade me like the body snatchers, a rather gruesome analogy, because they aren’t all creepy.  However, they are possessive of my conscious moments. Take Father winds the clock. I suspect Jim liked that as I do because it got him to thinking of the various roles we assume in a domestic household, roles that somewhat define character.  Few people have wind-up clocks anymore, a shame, because time is a patron saint of our lives.  To have to wind a clock keeps us mindful of the days ticking by.  In the phrase my brother loves, it also defines the role of a parent in a family, in this case a rather patriarchal role.  Father gains importance because of his role in winding the clock.  The clock becomes a symbol of Father’s purpose as caregiver, keeper of time.  In my 80th year, the phrase also triggers my image of a father dying and the clock silenced lacking his precise movement of the hands.  What a profound silence such death is.  For a moment, Time Stops.

                  Even time stops is one of those haunting phrases, particularly because it is antithetical to the truth.  Time never stops, regardless of any person or device marking its movement.  Never was I more aware of time’s progression than when my own father died.  The following day, I was running the track above the basketball court at the Washington Athletic Club.  Below me, a group of young men dribbled a basketball up and down the court.  Outside the open window, I heard traffic on 6th Avenue as people commuted to morning jobs.  Both activities felt like blasphemy.  How could the world march on when my father was no longer in that world?  Ironic, for with that very thought, I was running laps on that track.  Time does not stop.

                  What phrases are tucked in your pockets?  Do they astound you, arriving when you weren’t expecting, or are they phrases that remain with you for decades?  Perhaps they are the axioms of parenting:  Think before you speak, The early bird gets the worm.  Once you have become a parent, you polish those phrases off and pass them on to your offspring. If you have a wordsmith child, you may hear back, “But I am not a bird, and I don’t eat worms.”  As to thinking before speaking, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?  Oops there goes another one.  I like hearing new parenting phrases emerge, one in particular: Use your words. I didn’t have that phrase when I was raising my daughter, so when there were angry gestures, I resorted to physical responses, sometimes almost as physical as her tantrums.   Use your words suggests that the anger may be justified, but there is a more reasonable way to express it.  That said, my daughter was quite vociferous, and her words could have the force of a kick in the shin.

                  Some phrases are place specific.  Your familiarity with a locale goes along with your familiarity of place-specific phrases.  My friend Kristin, sent me a blog by David B. Williams in which he shares the linguistic history of words and phrases particular to Seattle.*  I was eager to add my own to his research (Montlake Cut, CHOP, Pill Hill, The C.D.)  My little collection reveals the years I have lived on Capitol Hill.

                  If you are a visual person, phrase collecting evokes many colorful images, and if you allow yourself time to visualize them, there is a chuckle for many are outrageous metaphors: sick as a dog, down in the dumps, high as a kite. Is an ill dog any more under the weather than your choking cat?  Who first imagined an intoxicated person as being high, and then up in the sky, making loops in the wind?  Down in the dumps makes perfect sense if you have ever held your nose while driving by a city landfill.

                  I look forward to the day when an imaginative linguist can find substitutes for empty phrases, especially phrases used when we really want to communicate feeling.  Our thoughts and prayers go with you is one of the most vacuous.  There is another school shooting, and the politicians bring out that phrase when grieving families want their children back.  I try to imagine those politicians on their knees that night saying their prayers and speaking the names of those lost. Yet, I also have sat with pen in hand, an open card before me, truly hoping to offer comfort when there has been a loss.  What comes to mind?  That same phrase, when I long for fresh phrases. 

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