One of the pleasures of producing Work of Art comes from the amount of help I receive from readers who submit bits and pieces they think might be of interest to the newspaper audience.
In fact, my friend John Shuster, a transplant from Minnesota, recently asked me why a piece is smaller than the pie, but the word “piece” is bigger than the word “pie.”
It’s precisely that kind of thinking that has inspired a number of columns.
I’ve been asked how a person can write an entire column — as I have — on the reflexive word “self”? Or devote many inches of space to the way people use the word “so,” or “up”?
Ben Moffett, a former Journal sportswriter who’s weighed in on my columns on the term “sapo,” meaning a lucky hit, wrote what he calls “an opportunity lost.” In last week’s column on the complexity of the English language, I used “cow” and “ruminating” in separate paragraphs and contexts. To this, Moffett wrote, “If you had used ‘ruminating’ up there in the ‘cow’ paragraph, we readers could have hurriedly credited you with a Tom Swiftie.”
Yes, I missed out on the Tom Swiftie, as well as the pun, which I now attempt: It doesn’t take a psycowlogist to realize that Moffett’s observations are moo-ving.
Several readers have contributed items which ponder why the plural of “goose” is “geese,” but the plural of “moose” isn’t “meese.”
Others, like Jane Quintana, a Highlands secretary, send strange e-mails with even stranger images. Perhaps you’ve seen this one: It juxtaposes two faces, one of them bearing a normal expression and the other a pained look.
But wait. There’s more. As one backs away from the images, they trade places. What optical magic causes this transformation? The day after I’d written to Jane that the images had become an obsession and were preventing me from doing my work, she followed up with yet another e-mail, this one more perplexing than the first.
Close up, it’s the face of Albert Einstein. But back up a little and the world’s greatest genius becomes Marilyn Monroe, the world’s greatest pinup.
Obviously, the view for me is better from a distance, my being a Monroe-phile. But the combination of the two is fitting, as it’s great to admire someone with brains as well as good looks.
• • •
Bob Johnston recently wrote a poem “to maximize the use of cliches based on the words ‘take’ and ‘took.’” He says the poem “turned out to be a sonnet, sort of.” It is titled “Epitaph of an Entrepreneur.”
Tick tack toe
Take took taken
You have to take off your hat to Billy Jim.
He never took a back seat, not to anyone,
And his motto was “Take the money and run.”
He never stopped and he never took a breather;
He never took time off and he never slept, either.
He always took a dim view of the human race,
Took each day as it came, no matter how grim,
Took a gander at Fate and stared him in the face.
But then he took a fancy to a prostitute.
The affair took the wind right out of his sails,
And his whole life took a turn for the worse.
He took a beating in the market, lost his loot.
He couldn’t take the heat. You could hear his wails
As they took him down the high road in a hearse.
• • •
During finals week at Highlands, I met Brenda Fresquez, an administrative assistant in the School of Business whose recollections of small-town home remedies are interesting, and to me, previously unheard of.
A resident of Chacon, 14 miles north of Mora, she commutes daily. Her descriptions of her early years in that pin-dot community made me recall one of the remedios my mother used on us: castor oil, for no matter what ails you.
Fresquez said that even though Chacon “has modern conveniences like satellite TV, and DSL Internet,” the village remains close-knit and neighborly, with friends and relatives in constant touch.
Her account of an unusual cure of her infant daughter stood out. The daughter, Delilah Abeyta, now 17 and a soon-to-be senior at Mora High School, had a severe stomach ailment at 6 months.
Visits to doctors were rare in even in those days, said Fresquez, and often people needed to rely on folk wisdom to cure people’s ills. Fresquez’s great-aunt, Michaela (Mickey) Maestas, with her collection of mason jars full of herbs and teas, often came to the rescue.
Once, when Delilah had colic, a neighbor conferred with Mickey, to recommend a treatment that consisted of “a wet, plump raisin, which they told me to put against the baby’s navel and wrap it with an Ace Bandage.”
Skeptical at first, Fresquez was pleased that the cure worked overnight, “and my daughter never had stomach trouble again.”
A relative was suffering from gastric distress (Brenda calls it “el empacho”) and recovered after the great-aunt massaged the young man’s stomach with a raw egg wrapped in a moist cloth.
It’s hard to conjecture on how many of these cures came about because of the old-fashioned remedios and how many might have disappeared on their own.
We don’t really know, but it’s fun to speculate.
Brenda said she misses the old ways people did things back then. “People used to make their own cheese and fresh bread, but that’s all changing.” One of the few “back-when” customs she still witnesses on her commutes is men on horseback on cattle drives.