Ampersand one more thing...

Have you ever found words that just SOUND like what they mean? Take the word "sensuous." The way you pucker up your lips in that Ingrid Bergman to Humphrey Bogart sort of way. Go ahead, say it outloud. See? It sounds exactly the way it is meant. Sexy, slow, languid. SINNNNNN Shoooooe Usssssssss..... Hey. Any word that has "sin," "shoe," and "us" enunciated so perfectly has to be said - and often. I love words. Always have. True story that many of you have heard over the years, but it bears repeating (there is another word...repeating... what is "peating" and why would I want to do it over and over?).... I was in Mr. Kakazu's class. Fifth grade. All of my best friends were in my homeroom (someone wasn't paying attention when they made that class roster). I was a talker. Oh I know, that's hard to believe now, but truly, I was verbose. I loved words. And I would quite often use them, much to the frustrations of Mr. Kakazu. He had a favorite punishment he liked to dole out to those pesky kids that constantly interrupted his train of thought when his back was turned to us. He would keep track of how many "shhhh's" he had to give out and then, without warning, he would round us all up and send us out to the ping-pong table on the patio of our classroom, reminding us to pick up a dictionary as we filed past the rolling book cart on our way out the door. Then, we were ordered to pull up a chair around said ping-pong table and he would "assign" us our punishment.

I would get pages six through twenty, Robyn would get pages fifty-two through sixty-five, Hector would get... well, you get the idea. Fifteen to twenty pages of copying down each word in the dictionary and at least two of the meanings for those words. Oh how the other kids hated it. They would moan and complain and fuss and eventually plop into their chairs with a huff and a growl. I would ever so quietly, for fear of being found out, open my book and gleefully begin on my "punishment." In fact, I enjoyed it so much, the other kids actually would bribe me with their lunch time snacks, money, and their coveted markers used in hop-scotch. Remember those? The best ones were made from rabbits feet and that little chain thingie. Yeah... I collected all the bribes and would do their pages too. I loved this punishment! In fact, I got punished alot that year. I spent a huge chunk of my fall and early winter quarters outside on the patio in the Southern California Indian Summers, having the time of my life with words. It was all working quite delightfully to my advantage. Until Mr. Kakazu decided to ask my mother, in one of those completely unnecessary parent-teacher conferences, why on earth did I talk so much and was there any way she could help out with this because I was constantly getting in trouble, getting punished, and it was driving him crazy! My mother, ever the protective hen, demanded to know exactly what sort of punishment he was meting out to me. He told her, with quite some pride in his voice, of his very clever, educational punishment. When my mother stopped laughing long enough to dry the tears from her eyes, she told him that he had picked quite the reward for her precious daughter. She told him how we spent nights together, working crossword puzzles, and how I would flip through the encyclopedias at home just for the fun of it. (Yes children, knowledge used to come in well-researched, factoid bound things called books, not the internet). She told him that the most dog-eared, page-worn book in our house was the dictionary and that I would spend my Sunday afternoons with it on my lap, going through it like an investigator on the trail of a good clue. And the fact that he put the exclamation point on the punishment by sending me outside into the sunshine and warm breezes just made it all that more rewarding to me! I sat through that conference in horror. My mother, mi madre, my avenger, my protector, my partner in acrostics was selling me down the river. She told my teacher she had the perfect punishment for me... and then sent me out of the room while she shared this parental nugget with this, this MAN teacher! Sure enough, a few days later, I was back at my old antics - talking to my buddies, catching up on the latest cartoons, when Mr. Kakazu wheeled around, pointed his yardstick at me, and said, "You. Now. Take your chair and go sit in the corner of the classroom library." Wait. What? I gathered up my spelling book and a dictionary and he said, "No... just you and your chair. Over there. Back to the wall. Facing the classroom." I grabbed a book to read. "Nope. Leave the book at your desk. Just you. Chair. Sit. And don't talk." Oh dear God in the merciful heavens. Sit? In the library? Surrounded by books? And... you mean, just SIT? And be quiet? But... "No buts Missy. Just yours on a chair." (Yeah, don't you love fifth-grade teacher humor?). For the next forty-five... yes, forty-five minutes... I know it was forty-five because I counted each and every one of them... I sat. And I watched the class engage in delightful discussions with the teacher and each other. Hold up. THEY get to talk and you're punishing me for talking?? SO not fair. My mother had figured out my own personal hell. Sitting. Quietly. Not reading. Not writing. Not answering questions. Not talking. Just watching everyone else have a jolly good time... without me. I wanted to turn my chair around and stare at the wall. I wanted to count the holes in the asbestos-lined ceiling tiles. Anything but this thing of no talking, no writing, no reading. Seriously? Is there a more potent hell than this? Despite all the subsequent years of mother-approved punishments from my teachers, I still love words. Ampersand is another of my favorites. It implies so much..it is a fancy essss... it indicates there is "more" of something... it is a long word for a symbol that means a short word... it is a dichotomy. An enigma, irony, and oxymoron all rolled into one. Someone used it in a sentence the other day. I was impressed. You do know what an Ampersand is... don't you? I have a dictionary. I believe it is on page six.