This little
story could be of interest only to writers or to students of aging. Here’s how
it goes.
So at age
sixty-four I have just finished writing a novel, a book of over 50,000 words. I
have been pondering the future of the manuscript and in so doing decided to ask
several people to read it to see if it makes sense, holds together, bores, or entertains.
While waiting for their responses, I’m trying to plan creative ways to reread
it in an attempt to make sure I will not send a possible agent or publisher a
work that seems unpromising. A tactic I learned from my daughter-in-law Heather
is to mark all “to be” words, changing them into something active unless they
present no alternative. My own idea is to check the use of all, uh, what’s the
word? Uh, that kind of word I have sometimes had trouble with. This is awful.
Not only do I have trouble selecting the right one of these words; I cannot
even think of the name for the type of word. Am I losing my mind? That’s not
beyond possibility given my age.
I recall
after doing so well in freshman written composition 101 and sophomore and
junior ancient Greek, I went for years without naming parts of speech or grammatical
stuff even though I was writing on a regular basis. When I entered graduate
school I was surprised that I didn’t have facility with that vocabulary
anymore. When I heard my professors talking about word use, metaphor,
participles, and the like, I realized I’d have to review things I learned in
junior high. And now again, after years of writing daily, I cannot think of
some simple grammatical concept I studied in Latin, Spanish, Greek, French, and
English!
Perhaps I
can discover my lost word if I begin writing about words. So I have noun and
verb, subject and predicate. I know objects, direct and indirect. There are past
and present participles which are verbal adjectives and gerunds which are
verbal nouns. Of course I know conjunctions: how could I ever forget PBS’s
“Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” But I have forgotten the elusive
word that started all this. What is the term for words such as over, under,
above, through, and behind? What is the word sometimes connected with places,
actions, characters, things, and so forth. I want it to begin with the letter c
or p but don’t remember. I do recall how the selection of the correct word has sometimes
seemed a challenge. I can misuse them, thus my impulse to have Heather check them
in my manuscript, but I can’t ask her to since I don’t recall the word. It
would be embarrassing since she teaches writing. I have to get it. Through,
beyond, beside and so forth are examples, but I cannot recall the grammatical
name.
I had a
problem with them in Greek; back then I believe it was because I couldn’t
recall the right Greek word that in English often serves as a prefix, for
example “meta.” Did it mean through or after? See, it still confuses me. I‘ll
work at this and will probably go upstairs to read Strunk and White’s Elements
of Style. Surely that old standby will instruct me. Pronouns, personal pronouns,
articles, modifier, adjective, adverb…. Still the word I’m searching for
doesn’t arise from the grammatical murk of my befuddled brain, but I’ll keep at
my memory quest.
The words
describe the relative position of things. There it is, finally: position; preposition.
I never thought of this, but the word describes its function. It’s the word at
the beginning of a phrase (of course, a prepositional phrase) that tells the
relative position of the expression it modifies. I was pretty sure I could
recall this word, my attempt stimulating the bank of grammatical words and giving
synapses time to connect. I like that. Somehow the recollection of this word
seems hopeful, as in: I still know what I know; I still have a functioning
brain.
A question
of an old person: Could loops in the aging sensory and memory system be analogous
with (is it ‘to’ or ‘with’?) the proliferation of capillaries in the aging
circulatory system? It’s a thought, but I recall I was only twenty-seven years
old when I first realized I couldn’t recall such grammatical terms. That really
surprised me for I had been out of undergraduate school only four years and
worked among college educated middle and upper-middle class folk. In four
years, I neither heard nor made in conversation even one reference to grammar!
This phenomenon of forgetting terms reminds me of my current need to say the
name of a muscle at least once a week or I’ll be unable to find the word when I
am trying to explain something to a client. Now that list of terms I
memorized in my fifties. Should I find that consoling? But lists of words I memorized
in junior high or even earlier and have used for decades? Why should they
disappear? Oh well, I’m just happy they are still available, even if my search
for them takes me into memories and the like. Someday (soon?) I’ll start
forgetting what I’m searching my mind for but hopefully will enjoy tours of my
past as I follow loop after loop through my tiring brain. I hope I find my past
as entertaining to me as I hope my novel will be to others.
© 23 November 2012
About the Author
Phillip Hoyle
lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In
general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two
years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now
focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE
program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs
at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com
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