Hampersand

My latest entries in the definitional duel:

Week Five:
Cannes-bull: A touriste bovine who discusses independent films over bœuf bourguignon.
Caripaean: Going on and on in your holiday letter about your tropical vacation.
Flabbergrassted: A condition of dazed plumpness in marijuana smokers who succumb to the munchies.
Siambic pentameter: A metrical line consisting of five feet, each containing an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable, on the topic of pre-democratic Thailand.

Week Six:
Hampersand: Conjoined pigs.
Sporkupine: Nocturnal beast with safely blunted quills.
Zomboni: A machine that smooths the way for brainless shambling.
Snickerdawdle: To linger in the kitchen in the hopes of being given a freshly baked cookie.

Pteroductyls

I was challenged to a word-smithing duel. The prize is homemade peanut brittle and bragging rights. Every week the two of us each submit four slightly-altered words with their punning definitions to a judge selected by the peanut brittler. She rules on her idiosyncratic favorites: 2 points for first place, 1 point for second place. If Robert, my challenger, can hold me off for eight weeks, his peanut brittle is safe. If I reach 8 points, the brittle is forfeit.

At first I thought we could alter only one letter in the original word, a condition to which I carefully adhered until Robert began playing fast and loose with phonemes*, submitting creative chimeras like “Haiti and T” (“a Caribbean communications company”).

A good time to tinker with words is while I do my deep-water physical therapy at the pool. Wearing a sky-blue flotation belt, I jog, ski, corkscrew and frog-jump vigorously through the water, gazing across the lap lanes out the pool’s big windows at the fir trees in the park. In the shallow end the instructor is hollering at my compatriots, “Good! Remember your posture! Now lift your noodle in the air and add a slalom jump!” Meanwhile I’m jitterbugging around in the deep end murmuring, “Ambiguous. Bambiguous. Flambiguous. Crambiguous. Amjiguous…”

We are halfway through the contest. Here are my first four weeks’ entries. I crack myself up.

Week One: (we only submitted 3 words the first week)
Manateen: That awkward adolescent stage when one feels ungainly as a sea-cow.
Castroturf: How the dictator keeps his lawn so green.
Pteroductyls: The dinosaurs who live in your heat vents.

Week Two:
Bulltimatum: “It’s them or me!” the matador’s girlfriend declared.
Inflatuated: In love with your British apartment.
Tharpshooter: A cowboy who’s not a fan of modern dance.
Geckolalia: The compulsion to repeat after lizards.**

Week Three:
Jambiguous: When the handwritten label on that old jar of preserves has faded into illegibility.
Flamingoo: Why I step carefully in the flamingo pen.
Bottoman: See also: Tushion.***
Frognosticate: To predict a Biblical plague.

Week Four:
Filiduster: To put off something unpleasant by engaging in vigorous housework.
Bisontennial: The anniversary of the great stampede.
Galchemy: Lesbian love at first sight.
Trisqué: Meeting your husband at the door wearing nothing but snack crackers.

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*My favorite of Robert’s so far is “Boodwire: Hidden microphone in a French woman’s bedroom.”

**Props to Kir for coming up with this word (the def is mine, and the combo is one of my favorites so far).

***Thanks to Amy for hashing this one out with me in the hot tub at the pool!

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2012.

pinkish-bluish

In storytime this week we read A Ball for Daisy. In this tale of sweeping emotion the floppy-eared Daisy loooves her red ball. She cuddles with it on the sofa; she carries it proudly on her walk; she tosses it to her friend… who pops it. Daisy is disconsolate, in a heartbreakingly doggy way, and trudging home, subsides sadly into her sofa. But in the end her doggy pal shows up at the park with a new ball, a blue ball, and a prancing Daisy gets to carry it home, every line of her loose and lively sketched body wriggling with happiness. (The book, by Chris Raschka, is on my personal short-list for the likely Caldecott.)

Right after the story, little Solana, dressed in scarlet flannel footie pajamas accessorized with pearls and a feather barrette, arose from the audience, meandered up and planted herself in front of me. “Are we going to do a skeleton dance now?” she inquired.

This was not a suggestion I had expected A Ball for Daisy to provoke. “Well, that’s an interesting question. Do you want to do a skeleton dance?” The rest of the kids in the room watched this interchange with silent absorption, as though we were the cartoon before the next movie.

Gloomily, Solana shook her head. “Huh-uh. I don’t like skeletons.” After a pause during which I raised my eyebrows at Solana’s mother, who made mystified gestures, Solana added, “But they aren’t real; they’re only for Halloween.” Then, gazing dreamily at the ceiling, she continued: “One time I slept cuddling a ball.”

“You did?”

“It wasn’t a red ball or a blue ball, though.”

“What color was it?”

“Oh…” she waved her hands illustratively, glancing around for inspiration, “kind of pinkish-bluish…” That was it. She seemed to be finished. She wandered off again. There was a short silence while we all considered these revelations.

One of the parents grinned at me and asked, “Where do you go from here?” It seemed to me we could go practically anywhere. I told everybody to stand up for the Bubblegum Song.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

What we learned about the cat

Dad at storytime: Do you want to tell Teacher Deborah what you learned about the cat?
3-year-old daughter: …Cat?
Dad: That sunny day we had yesterday? What did you learn about the cat?
Daughter, to me, solemnly: No sunscreen.
Dad: That’s right, no sunscreen on the cat. Do you remember how you learned that?
Daughter, pointing at nose, sorrowfully: Scratches.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

milestone

For the first time in a year and a half, I just walked around the block. I can’t even believe it.

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The dog ambled along, all pleased and matter-of-fact. She brought no particular gravitas to the occasion. She’s been wondering for ages what the hold-up has been.

The dark air was soft after the rain, and the fallen leaves of the katsura lay rumpled across my front walk. I stepped on them and didn’t fall. Nobody was around.

Carefully I walked past the three houses that have been the limit of my tether this summer. My feet held me up. Boldly, gently, I stepped down into the street. The remains of the day’s rain clouds shredded away to the edges of the sky. Mild city stars glowed in the hazy dark like distant streetlights.

I took the left past Amy’s house. It felt like a wild risk. The glorious musk of rock rose drifted out to me in the dark.

I passed the twin curly willows. They’ve grown taller. I brushed by shrubberies I haven’t seen up close since 2010. My feet told me I would be okay. I would get home. I would sit on the damp sidewalk to rest if I needed to. I rounded the next turn. Motorcycles revved two streets away. My surprised body kept walking.

I tried to tell if I was doing it right. Not quite, I think. My calves cramped up a bit. I tried to find my old native swing, but my feet, gently aching, dropped carefully down. My hips worried. Everything was ordinary: cracked sidewalk; recycling bins at the curb; a saucy cat under a parked car, surprising the dog.

And me, out in it. As though people could just join the world whenever they wanted.

*

My heart is about wrung out, hoping I can do it again.

*

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

swifts

I do so love the swifts.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

In which my wheelchair earns its keep

At the end of the taiko drumming workshop, a woman pushing a girl in a wheelchair cracked open the door and asked diffidently if they could join us. The performer, who was just packing up her drums, smiled in welcome and beckoned the pair in. The wheelchair’s grasshopper green detailing didn’t disguise the fact that it was seriously customized. The girl inside was slight and curled in upon herself. Her head lolled, drool fell from the corners of her mouth, and her eyes scanned randomly left and right. Her fragile arms were drawn up close to her bird-boned body. “Can she hold a drumstick?” asked the drummer, and the woman said no, but maybe she’d like the sound of the drum.  The drummer set a small taiko on its stand at the girl’s feet. Gently, she began tapping and thumping the drum, and the girl’s mouth gaped wide into a startled smile. “You like that, Carly?” murmured the woman. She held Carly’s tiny bare foot against the head of the drum to feel its thrumming. Carly jerked all over and smiled again. The woman wiped up her drool and beamed.

When the drummer began at last to put away her taiko, Carly’s young grandmother (as she explained herself to be) told me shyly: “I knew this library had opened a year ago, and we only live a few blocks away, but I’ve never been before. It’s so hard to get her all packed up and in the wheelchair, and I don’t have a van to lift her, so we waited for good weather to walk over. It’s the first time I’ve taken her grocery shopping next door, too, actually. I just get so tired of people staring, you know? And she can make noises, and you never know where we’ll be welcome. I wasn’t sure it would be okay to take her into the library, but then through the glass I saw the drumming going on in here, and I thought she might like the drums, but I didn’t know if we’d be welcome in here with the other kids. But then I saw you in your wheelchair, and you were in charge of things, so I thought people must be used to you, and if you were in a wheelchair, it must be okay to bring Carly in.” It about broke my heart.

We talked for half an hour. Tearfully, she kept saying that it was the sight of me in my wheelchair, so clearly belonging here, that made her feel safe enough to enter the library. She talked about all the years people had stared at her and her own severely autistic son, and how worn down she felt about venturing into the public world. She’s worried about her own limitations as a caregiver: Carly’s rare interactions with other children; how to support her in acquiring language and literacy in case one day she can use a machine to communicate. I practically begged them to join us at storytime.

And the very next day they came back. This time she brought her son, too. Across the room I caught her eye and we shared a smile as her son, painstakingly and loudly, read a book to delicate Carly, propped up and maybe smiling, in her bold green wheelchair.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

Maybe it’s the ears?

Tilly lives in a yellow house with her friends Hector the pig, Tumpty the bashful elephant, Pru the fashion-forward chicken, Doodle the alligator, and Tiptoe the rabbit. Their domestic adventures are chronicled in a series of picture books by Polly Dunbar. Everybody at my storytimes relates to them. For example, in one of my favorite installments, Doodle wakes up feeling bitey, and we are reminded that it’s never a nice plan to bite your friend on the bottom.

The other evening I read Good Night, Tiptoe to a group of preschoolers. In this tale, the housemates are getting ready for bed: Tumpty takes a bath, Doodle brushes her teeth, Pru puts curlers in her tail. But Tiptoe isn’t sleepy, and he bounces around in his blue-striped onesie pajamas as Tilly helps everyone settle down. Tiptoe looks very fetching in these pj’s: his little tufty tail pokes out in the back, and even his tall rabbit ears are cozily pajama’d.

As Tilly shepherds her friends through their bedtime routine, Tiptoe helps by squirting out ells of toothpaste and frolicking with Tumpty in the bath. The storytime kids chuckled at Tiptoe’s shenanigans. “Look,” called out one of my young listeners, himself attired in train pajamas, “the elephant is picking up Tiptoe in his trunk.” “

So he is,” I agreed, pointing to the scene. “Tumpty, the elephant, is picking up Tiptoe… and what kind of animal is Tiptoe?”

There was a blank, baffled pause. The kids gazed up at Tiptoe with his long skinny ears and his blue striped pajamas. After a while one of the kids offered, “…An ant?”

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

one thing and another

One thing:

On Thursday at 10:30 I had a required training at the County building. No one else I know was going, but several colleagues had hazy memories that there was handicapped parking on the busy street out front. “Parking’s always bad there,” said one coworker, “and I can remember one time being psyched about an empty spot, pulling in, and then thinking, ‘Oh crap!’ and leaving again, so I think that was a handicapped spot. I usually end up parking three or four blocks away.” Anticipating accessibility challenges, I arrived 35 minutes early. There was an empty spot out front! Maybe this would go smoothly!… but it turned out to be 15-minute parking. There were no handicapped spots. Really? I circled around the one-way streets and back through all the red lights to check again, on all sides of the block. Really: no handicapped parking spaces.

Reluctantly, I resolved to gamble on the parking garage across the busy street. If its handicapped spots were right up front, there was a chance I could hobble with my walker all the way down the garage ramp, jay-walk vulnerably back across the busy street, ascend back into the County building, get to the elevators, and shuffle down the halls to the conference room, before my feet gave out.

I circled the block again. The parking garage had a big sandwich board sign blocking the entrance. It said, “PARKING LOT FULL. No Entry.” Looking at it, my stomach began to hurt. I pulled back into traffic, circled around the garage and through all the lights again, and parked in the 15-minute spot.

If I hung up my disabled parking permit, would they let me stay there for the duration of the 90-minute training? I hauled out my walker (the tendinitis in my arms is too bad for me to roll myself in the wheelchair, so I had to leave that in the car), lifted it up the front steps, and hobbled into the big building. A sign at the front desk said the guard would be right back. I waited 5… 8… 12 minutes, trying all the time to catch anyone else’s eye. The lobby was large. Any possible offices on this floor were too far away for me to walk to. My feet already hurt. It was now 10:20.

I managed to flag down a tall, shambling man wearing a County ID (everyone was), to see if he knew of handicapped parking nearby. He racked his brains and looked embarrassed on behalf of the County, but had to give up, wandering apologetically down the hall.

A few minutes later he reappeared and approached me again. “Listen,” he offered, “what if I run across to the parking garage, see if they’ve got some handicapped spots free? Maybe they’ll let you in.” I winced at the idea of doing all my hobbling and block-circling in reverse, but sent him off to do his best. It was 10:25. I’d now been trying to park for half an hour.

Two minutes later he hove back into view, beckoning enthusiastically from the sidewalk outside. Simultaneously the guard returned to the desk and, when I asked if I could park for an hour and a half under the aegis of my parking tag, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know what they’ll do.” They. So I thanked the kind shambling man and got myself painfully back to the car, drove through the lights and around the block, and entered the parking garage.

There I asked the parking attendant in her dim kiosk where to find the handicapped spaces. She waved back into the dark depths of the structure, somewhere around the corner in the opposite direction from the building I needed to enter. It was at this point that I started to cry. She was very compassionate, kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” rolling her R’s, and assuring me with wide eyes that I really could park in those spots. “I know… but it’s too far for me to walk,” I said tearfully, and thanked her, and defeatedly began winding around the garage, heading for the exit.

But there was an empty parking spot, a regular parking spot, just before the exit. I pulled in and sat there in the dark with my hands over my face, trying to get it together, trying to scrape up the gumption for one more sally. My arms were shaking. Then I hauled my walker out one more time and began the slow hobble down the ramp to the exit bar.

By the time I limped on my hurting feet across two bike lanes and three traffic lanes, and back into the building, and down the corridor to the elevators, and up to the 5th floor, and down the hall to the conference room where the training was being held, it was 10:36. The instructor was speaking, gesturing to a slide. Fumbling with my walker, I opened the door. Everyone looked up.

Another thing:

On Saturday I went to a party, on a small horse farm out in the country. Turning into the tree-shaded drive, I stopped to text my friends I had arrived. “Drive up to the house,” came the reply, so I passed the score of cars relegated to a side lot and swanned right up the driveway to the party. My friends were waiting, eager to lug out my wheelchair and walker. Joking and shoving, they manhandled my resisting chair up onto the lawn and offered me drinks.

We moved in tandem across the lawn, one person pushing me and the wheelchair slowly through the grass, another ferrying my walker to the next flat spot. People waved and smiled hello. A friend went through the buffet line with me, holding my plate as I knelt on my walker, asking for tortillas, beans, guacamole, salsa. Someone saved me a chair. People I’d met at other parties brought their babies over to say hi. A man with sleeve tattoos told me a story about a cougar.

When the eight-piece salsa band started up, I was rolled gaily, bumpily back down to the grassy dance floor. I asked the owner of the house, whose tiered gardens covered most of an acre before fading into fields and woods, if I could borrow a gardener’s kneeling pad. She brought me three. As kids played with hula hoops over by the bocce court, and swallows darted for insects over the grape arbor, the band spiced the evening with saucy cumbias, cha-chas, salsas, and merengues. Everybody was moving. I clambered up on the seat of my walker, knelt on the gardener’s foam, gave a little ring with my chipmunk bicycle bell, and began to dance.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

silly jam pictures

…for your delectation.