By the Lake/That They May Face the Rising Sun

I'm just about winding up reading "By the Lake" a novel by John McGahern. Like some other readers of this book I am putting off reading the last few pages as I just want to savour, more slowly, the language. The unspoken words lying underneath.

Like this - from the loss of a tiny newborn lamb on the small holding of the main protagonist and his wife, Ruttledge and Kate:

P283 "It was as if the black lamb reached back to other feelings of love and disappointment and gathered them into an ache that was out of all proportion to the small loss."

P234".....ran the sense, like an underground river, that there would come a time where these days would be looked back on as happiness, all that life could give of contentment and peace."

P141 "But how can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh."

As I read his scrumptiously detailed writing about the ordinary local doings and the comings and goings of characters and seasonal changes, I find memories resurface, my words more fine tuned as I explore some poetry I'm writing, richer ideas for stories. For there are no plotlines to many of his works, it's all in his observations, of the lake, of candlelight, of sun and shadow and rain and most of all the complexity beneath the surface of his characters.

This book was John McGahern's swan song. He was dying of cancer at the time he wrote it. His other books and short stories are dark, with threads of anger and hopelessness until the characters escape from the savagery of rural Ireland, unsuccessful in the hiding of their scars.

Misinterpretation

I have this thing. I just wonder if anyone else does it. I'll mishear or misunderstand something and my version becomes my favourite and if you happen to say the word or the phrase I secretly convert it to my chosen meaning.

Example:

My first awareness of this came about when my mother was reading out loud from a letter she'd received from my godmother, her sister, who lived in London, England. I would have been about eight.

Mum read that my aunt and her family were having their annual "hols" in Weston-Super-Mare that summer.
I was green with envy. I thought: what an adventure, riding out to the west on great big horses.

"Why can't we do that?" I asked her.

"Because we're in Ireland and they're in England!" my mother probably explained.

"But there are lots of big horses here too, we don't have to go to England!"

At this point I was ignored I would think, I was one of those kids who would try the patience of anyone within earshot, always asking question after question.

But the visions in my head of Auntie Norah, Uncle Michael and their two small daughters galloping off to the magical west on their super mares never left me.

Even today, every time I see or hear Weston-Super-Mare I can still picture the four of them, hair flying, laughing joyfully, cantering over hill and dale chasing after Roy Rogers and Trigger - for that was the only west I knew then.

The Wild West.

Oh, and happy trails to you!

Comfort (and maybe joy?)

Have I ever told you how much I love Newfoundland? No? Well, I do, my arms can't stretch out wide enough to show you. Over the past eight years more and more treasures have been revealed to me. Not just the scenery, that is a class unto itself. But so are the people. And the words.

Holy Hannah - the words. Comfort is an ordinary word you'd think. Not so in Newfoundland.

It's used both as a noun and verb here. Meaningfully. You get an old fellah and an old gal, both widowed. And they hook up. They mightn't shack up as Revenue Canada would immediately start shaving away at their single status Canada Pension and Old Age Security - fellah and gal now being coupled and domiciled at one address. No, they maintain separate addresses, usually.

Now how would you describe such a relationship?

Well, they are each other's "comfort". Oh, Eddie up the road? Oh, his comfort is Annie, lives down by the church. And vice versa.

No one thinks twice about it. I was delighted to see it formalized in an obit in the paper recently and shared it with my daughter.

John Smith (pseudonyym) survived by his comfort Shirley Murphy.

My neighbour Gracie (5 years older than me) is currently in the enviable position of having two comforts and she shares her time equally with them both, one is 87, the other is a spry young fellow of 62. She has tremendous difficulty wiping the smile off her face and tells me she looks forward to going to her own home for a night or two for a rest.

I've no idea how to get a bit of comfort for myself. Perhaps I should hang out a shingle?

"Comfort both offered and received. No strings attached."

And now I can't pass a Comfort Inn without an internal giggle overtaking me.

Bockety

Picture is of Bockety Bird, Cape St. Mary's, Newfoundland, August 2008

I still can’t get used to the people who pop their eyes at me when I use this word. I’ve always used it. To describe my bike when its wheel is bent. To describe a cake that comes out of the oven all up and down. To describe a really bad haircut or an imperfect piece of knitting. Or even a road full of potholes.

Oh it’s bockety! I cry sadly, stroking the crooked object with affectionate pity.

It’s one of those perfect words because it’s onomatopoeic.

And then I find out that my lovely well-used word is Cork slang. No wonder the rest of the world outside of Cork looks at me sideways.

From the Cork Slang Dictionary:

Bockety
Construct: Adjective
Definition: Crooked, out of alignment.
Use: One of the table legs is bockety.One of the table legs is crooked - meaning short.
Derivation: Probably from the Irish 'Bacac' - imperfect, defective. (Dinnen)Also note 'Bockady' - a lame person (Joyce)

And today, well, it’s a bockety day.
And how’s yours?

WORDS

A heated debate was going on over at Grandad’s blog and continued at Nick’s, and others’ too, perhaps!

It inspired me to write both a lengthy response to what Grandad wrote but also to write a post of my own.

The pen is mightier than the sword. I would say the pen, or keyboard, has razor edges to it.

Some people are anti-PC, that little “politically correct" adjective that has insinuated itself into our language. Some have it all mixed up with the right to use any words they choose, words like “golliwog”, “mick”, “paddy”, “redneck”, etc. Derogatory, horrible words that go far behind the few letters I put down here. I don’t need to spell them out for anyone.

Us women have fought long and hard to have generic words like chairperson, fisher and firefighter put into the language to make all these jobs accessible to us. (I’m old, they weren’t you know. You’re welcome.) You call that PC? Terrific!

They say the PC police are out to take Christmas away and St. Patrick’s day away and even Easter. Well no one’s out to take anything away but there is certainly a need to recognise other cultures in our midst who do not have their special feasts recognised. What about thinking of PC as adding something to all of us! An enhancement. Try Ramadan just once! Or Hannukah! Just think about it.

For isn’t this how most of the trouble in the world begins? The lack of tolerance for others’ beliefs, customs, gods, women, gays?

There are no easy answers to any of it. I don’t know what it is like to live in a country where the Christian traditions are not honoured. I would probably feel extremely alienated (and alone) in Israel or India. I would miss Christmas (even though I know longer call myself a Christian).

I was brought up in a household where the most appalling words were thrown at children on a regular basis. Words I had to look up in the dictionary. Words that damaged and wounded to the core. Words that still live on fifty years later. There are no expiry dates on words like those.

I have beloved gay friends that can’t walk down a street without some epithet being flung from a car or a passerby while I walk down a street in freedom.

"Handle with care" should be written on every word before it leaves the keyboard or mouth.

Good words:
~Respect.
~Courtesy.
~Compassion.
~Kindness.

Call me a bitch. It’s the new black.


And to read more insight on words, please go to Jenny at South Belfast Diary for a great post.

Uninvented Words

We don’t have a word that describes those moments suspended between the fearful and the brave, the ugly and the beautiful. Moments like this for me have involved animals. Perhaps other languages have that strangeness of feelings covered. Like funerals when you want to laugh, and weddings when you want to cry.

And a cat I saw the other day. It had been hit by a vehicle, no doubt, and dragged to a nearby snowbank. A tabby who looked like he was asleep, but the bright red blood on the snow told his story. The sleek fur of the cat and the invisible wound bleeding his life onto the hurting-white snow, his owners still unaware of his dreadful fate. An awful and indelible portrait. Savage beauty.

And speaking of cats - I was between cats once. Working cats as it turned out because my house became plagued with mice.

Mice have terrified me since I was three years old and one ran across my bed. I had them mixed up with rats in my imagination and thought they would eat my nose right off my face. I could hear them behind the skirting (base) boards of my bedroom in the ancient old house in which we lived. My father, to his credit, honoured my terror and every night would go around the circumference of my bedroom with a hammer and nails, banging fresh pieces of wood on to the existing skirting boards to keep the mice ‘out’. Then he would sing me my song and only then would I fall sleep. When I look back at those moments they are strung between the horror of another mouse on my bed and the love of my father who performed this ridiculous nightly act to keep my terror at bay.

But back to the story. The invasion of mice in my house was finally dealt with by a professional pest control service. But in the meantime, one had managed to infiltrate the piano and in the middle of the night would scamper up and down the keys playing these light tinkling glissandos. I called him Beethoven. My dog of the time, a very intelligent Lhasa Apso, had a ‘family’ of small stuffed animals that she liked to groom and carry in her mouth around the house only to regroup them in different areas. She would line them up in various locations in the house as if for a photograph. There were ten of them and they all had names. If you asked her for ‘Pooky” she would select the right miniature and bring it to you. Ditto for “Dusty” and on down the line. A dog enchanted with her own cleverness. Over breakfast one morning, I was looking at the latest arrangement of her family, poised between the living and dining rooms and realized there was an unnamed extra. Yep. It was a freshly groomed dead mouse, all his fur slicked beautifully into place by the maternal dog. Suspended between throwing up and screaming and laughing. That was me.

A condition for which there is no name.

Luscious words

"The Dictionary of Newfoundland English" is a massive tome, 770 pages plus a forward. And I read it like a novel. Many words have the scent of Ireland about them, words of my grandparents and particularly the words of my great-grandmother who was a cranky old wan, disliked by many, but kind to me. "I only have room for the one," she said to my grandmother and her daughters, "Just the one great-grand one!" and she pointed to me and that was it. She refused to have the other great grandchildren around her.

She made a bit of an effort with me. She'd call me her "angashore", not quite the equivalent of "dotey pet" which was used by my Granny. Angashore might have been a bit of a step down from dotey pet but coming from the Great and Fearful Nana S., this was a total endearment. Angashore: a weak little thing, a thing to be pitied, coddled, protected and fed, in a correct translation for that era.

Newfoundlanders have made of the word their very own.
Here, in the dictionary we get:
Angashore, Angyshore
(1) A poverty stricken creature
(2) A weak, sickly person, an unlucky person deserving pity.
(3) A man regarded as too lazy to fish.
(4) An idle, mischievous child or person.
(5) A migratory fisherman from Newfoundland who conducts a summer fishery from a fixed station on the coast of Labrador.

In the tradition of Gaeilge, the Irish language, words beginning with vowels were aspirated (an h put in front) when used in complex sentences. Angashore was packed on board the fishing boats leaving from Wexford and Cork sailing for the new found land, along with the bait, hooks, nets and lines way back in the seventeenth century.

And it emerged at the other side of the Atlantic, sometimes, as "hangashore", thus the new definition in (5) above. A stationary fisherman: "hang a shore".

I just love the evolution of language and I particularly like the special connection for me in this one gorgeous word.