Words and Apples

Words and Apples


Being a would-be-wordsmith is more than a hobby – it’s an everyday JOB; a labor of love (and patience) with drills about once every few minutes or so. This is true in speaking as well as writing, despite the popular opinion of those predisposed to wear word-blinders who are of more analytical-mathematical-technological minds. Words are everywhere, all the time – lurking inside our minds, swimming in a force field around us. They lurk in cyberspace and beyond. It's a privilege to co-exist in the world WITH them; to know the potential of communication. They’re important, and can make or break deals, as well as human hearts, so I want to pick the right/best one as often as possible.

I often mess up, though. It’s really easy to fall into bipolar tendencies with words – especially verbally spoken ones.

Selecting words is sort of like choosing which apple to pick off the tree. I remember when our apple trees along the drive in Buck Creek were loaded, their branches hanging like curved umbrella wires dripping with fruit. You didn’t want to grab a green one and end up tossing it to the calves in the feedlot, those dumb creatures with much less discriminating tastes that were willing to chomp down sour marbles. Better to take your time, scan the options well, and go for one with a reddish blush on the skin - one that smelled fruity and allowed your fingernail to leave a dent. It seems that in some ways, picking words is similar except that once they’re spoken or written, it’s harder to throw them in the feedlot. They’re forever. Even those hard, green ones.

A couple of days ago a man appeared at the back door here in Michigan wearing a vest with wide yellow stripes. I smelled a rat instantly, knowing the electrical people in charge of our power lines have been up-and-down the road for the past year, mercilessly destroying and maiming trees. We’ve trimmed back our maple by the road accordingly, hoping for grace, dreaming that they’d wear blinders as they went past and say good-enough, these people are helping us out here, let’s leave them alone. And yet by definition they are tree terrorists bound by the letter of the law with no creative or situational mindset. I knew we had reason to fear.

The guy was nice enough; he was just doing his job. He said he wants to cut down the maple tree, the whole dignified but already-shaved-on-one-side tree – although he was willing to be kind and give us a coupon to buy a new baby tree, and offered to grind the stump as a perk – small consolations. To give him credit, there was some other higher-up guy to whom we could appeal, although even if HE agreed to save the tree, another major swath would be cut out of its center. The remaining freak would be a trunk with about a fourth of the top leaning off to one side. Cutting it down is probably more desirable, in the end analysis.

He also wants to trim (bald?) two of our giant oaks on the side toward the road. Great.

After receiving this collective bad news I just stood there with a grimace on my face, thinking all these hard, green, spontaneous and unripe thoughts/words I didn’t dare speak out loud: stupid-power-line-people-don’t-they-know-wind-storms-always-come-off-the-lake-and-that-maple-would-never-fall-in-their-lines-and-besides-I-don’t-trust-their-trimming-of-the-oaks-since-it-will-probably-be-more-like-slaughtering-and-beautiful-old-maple-and-oak-trees-don’t-grow-back-overnight. Instead, I knew those words belonged in the feedlot so I looked at the man meekly, and said, “I’m just so sad. So very, very SAD.” My bottom lip quivered. I’m sure he was ready to puke.

Not long after that we decided to visit an organic farm just south of Dowagiac, about 30 minutes from the lake house. The drive was lovely, up and down hilly, pastoral, wind-swept countryside. We found the small store attractive and enticing. I eyed the organic chickens, whole birds shrink-wrapped like big, oversized garbanzo beans. “Do you want one?” Fritz asked.

“Yes. And some beef soup bones. And a box of these strawberries.”

He started to pull the chicken out of the freezer, thinking, I’m sure, he would follow in my wake and be a dutiful service man.

“No-no-no! I’ll get it later…going to look around first, at the rest of the store, then I’ll come back and get what I want so the frozen meat stays frozen until the last minute.” My words were authoritative. They hung in mid-air, like some sort of verbal mace.

He looked at the store attendant sheepishly and muttered, “I need to remember to just be along for the ride and do what I’m told.” Poor guy.

When we got home I realized we hadn’t started draining the hot tub, a several-day-job when you consider the time it takes to balance the water. The tub was a month overdue to be cleaned and with our back-and-forth lifestyle, there wasn’t going to be a better time anytime soon. “OH! We forgot to drain the tub!” I exclaimed, with more than a miniscule measure of irritation in my voice.

“Do you want me to drain it for you now?” Fritz responded.

I stalled, fuming inside. “NO. No, I DO NOT want to do it right now.” Then this torrent of words flew out of my mouth like Niagra Falls, complete with rock-splattering arrogance. “I’m the one who always cleans it – and yet I don’t use it nearly as much as some other people.” Venom might as well have been flying from my tongue.

After storming around and stomping through my 2-mile walk, which is the best holistic therapy I’ve found, I softened. “Would you pull the stopper on the tub for me please? If it drains pretty fast I can still clean it before it gets dark.”

“If you’re up for it,” Fritz said, looking skeptical, as if dodging potential word-grenades while waiting for the next land mine to go off.

I hate it when I’m so mouthy.

That same evening I was editing the 3rd chapter of Fritz’s text he’s been writing for Purdue. Most of the time the corrections are just wording choices, or grammatical tweaks. He’s actually very bright and a pretty decent writer, considering he’s one of those math-minded, analytical-types. But then I came upon a doozie. It deserves to be read slowly, word-for-word, to get the full effect:

“The cost-volume-profit analysis technique provides incite into the how the decision will affect the company’s cost structure and the volume of work required by that cost structure to yield the annual profit goal for the company.”

The whole sentence flew into the feedlot, pronto