Words, smiles, dying . . . or living

Sunday was lovely. I had friends, the Ps, over for lunch. I like cooking, but I am not very good at housekeeping. “They are not the same thing,” my man wisely said.

I love rainy days. I love the fresh smell in the air, the sound of it in the grass or on a tin roof, or any roof, drumming, pattering, pouring, drenching. I also love words.

Onomatopoeia. Do you know that that is? I read once in a wonderful book, A Touch of Wonder, a story of a man who had befriended the author when he was young. He was dying of something, but the boy didn’t know. But it didn’t really matter. What does dying matter, you can’t stop it, you can’t change it, but you can change how you live. Are you busy living or dying? to paraphrase a quote from Shawshank Redemption. That movie is about living and hoping when you are in a living death, when you know you are dying. Anyway, that was a rabbit trail.

The man taught English, but he called it “a course in magic—in the magic of words . . . . Words, just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have. They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They can even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on a page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it. Here! Write a word that looks or sounds like what it means.”

He challenged the boy, and me, to “think of five works that look like what they mean and five words that sound like what they mean. Don’t go asleep until you do.” Try it. Round . . . pointy . . . smile . . hmm, look at your mouth while you say smile your mouth smiles when you say it. I dare you, say smile and not smile. Yes, I know you can if you try hard enough, but what’s the good of that? Smile at one person today and see if they smile back. I bet they will.

Back to the rabbit trail. Thinking about living or dying, I heard Saturday on the radio, “What would you do if you had one day to live?” But many people assume I’m not going to die tomorrow, what if . . . what if only divine providence kept you from dying today, you drive to work, climb on something, slip, catch yourself, “Whew”, you don’t fall off the horse; how many times are we saved from dying and don’t know it? The question “What would you do if you had one day to live?” assumes you will be alive the day after tomorrow. I ask, “What if you had one day to live, and we had no guarantee that we would be alive the day after tomorrow?” What would you do differently? What would I do differently? I’m not sure, I might just enjoy living a little more, but moaning the day away in regret is a waste. Making things right is not a waste. Another form of that question is this one, “What would you do if you could not fail?”