snotty ingrate

For the second time this winter, I have a cold.  Though, sadly, while the first was mild and mercifully brief, this one has me down for the count.  The past two nights, I slept terribly, completely unable to breathe through my stuffed nose.  Today, I’ve moved on to the runny nose stage, flying through tissues at an alarming clip.   But though I seem to have blown out my entire bodyweight in mucous, it appears I’m a surprisingly efficient snot factory; no matter how quickly I clear out my nasal passages, I re-booger just as fast.

Still, in between stretches of complaining and feeling sorry for myself, I’ve been hit by moments of extreme gratitude.  Not for how I feel at the moment, which is miserable indeed, but for how I feel the rest of the time.  The vast majority of the year, I can breathe easily (and through both nostrils!), even if I normally take that delight entirely for granted.

Similarly, until I fractured my wrist at the end of last year, and then limped through months of splinted immobility followed by the ongoing process of wrist rehab, I had sort of overlooked how excellent it is to have two working hands.  (And, in particular, to have my dominant hand working, a distinction whose magnitude I first truly grasped while learning to wipe with the other hand.)

All of which makes me think of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and his beautiful writing about ‘non-toothache days.’ As Hanh observes, when you have a toothache, it’s all you can think about; you’d give nearly anything to make that pain stop.  Yet, once it inevitably does, you’re only briefly grateful.  Soon, you’re back to forgetting how wonderful it is just to live in a world of happy teeth.  That said, and despite my daily meditation habit, I’m sure achieving the mindfulness required to constantly appreciate the beauty of non-toothache days (and non-snotty days and two-handed days) is still well beyond me.  Indeed, even by next week, if I’m back to cold-free, I’m sure I’ll again completely overlook the beauty and joy of that simple, healthy baseline.  But, for now, surrounded by my pile of tissues, I’m at least reminding myself to look forward to it.  If I can’t be grateful in that moment, I can at least improve this current moment by trying to be appreciative in advance.

Cut

Benjamin Franklin, who helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, once share this anecdote with Jefferson:

When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open a shop for himself.  His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription.  He composed it in these words: “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” with a figure of a hat subjoined.  But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments.  The first he shewed it to thought the word “hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats” which shew he was a hatter.  It was struck out.  The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats.  If good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made.  He struck it out.  A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit.  Every one who purchased expected to pay.  They were parted with, and the inscription now stood “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats” says his next friend?  Why nobody will expect you to give them away.  What then is the use of that word?  It was stricken out and “hat” followed it, the rather, as there was one painted on the board.  So his inscription was reduced ultimately “John Thompson” with the figure of a hat subjoined.

 

Word Up

My whole life, I’ve loved words.  Enough so that, when I was just four or five, whenever I learned a new one, I’d walk around for the subsequent week trying to wedge it into as many sentences as I possibly could.  A voracious reader from even that age, I stumbled across most of my new words in books.  And, each time I did, I was assiduous about looking it up.

But, over the decades, I ran into fewer and fewer words that I didn’t know.  Until, eventually, I had fallen out of the definition-hunting habit.  When I did find something new, stopping my reading, even just to make note of the word, seemed an undue hassle.  And I could almost always roughly grasp the word from context.  So, instead of pausing to Google, I’d just plow ahead.

Back in November, however, I came across a surprising use of ‘salient’ in an Economist article.  And, as I happened to be sitting next to a physical dictionary, I paused to look the word up, discovering a second definition I had never known: an outwardly projecting part of a fortification or line of defense.

I have a longstanding weakness for secondary meanings – ‘pedestrian,’ in the sense of ‘commonplace,’ being a favorite – so I wrote the new definition of salient down in my journal.  And then, a few weeks later, I stumbled across ‘anatine’ in a short story, looked it up, and wrote that down, too.

From there, a new habit was born – or, more accurately, an old one rebirthed.  In the few months since, I’ve already picked up otiose, rachitic, oneiric, diluents, vitrine.  And I’ve reminded myself of words I knew, but that were parked too far in the recesses of my brain to be called up for conversational use: parvenu, febrile, palimpsest.

Much like my five year old self, I am now truly smitten with those discoveries and re-discoveries.  Though, unlike the words I was excited about 35 years back, these I’m sadly forced to largely keep to myself.  Use ‘anatine’ or ‘oneiric’ in conversation with all but the nerdiest and wordiest of fellow readers, and I’d likely get nothing but a confused stare in response.

Even so, I’ll be back to looking up new words as I discover them, and will continue to expand my list.  If nothing else, it makes me awfully happy just to read them over, to roll them around in my head, to see how they feel coming to life on my tongue.