Lolabola kindly posted a series of comic strips that she found who-the-heck-knows-where after I referred to them when commenting on her blog. She wanted to know how could remember them from so long ago.
What I told her was true: Some girls remember first kisses; I remember when I first learned a new word. [1]
Those Bloom County comic strips taught me the word “snipe”.
I learned the word “happenstance” from a televised documentary. I don't remember the content of the show but I do remember spinning around to ask my dad: “is that a real word?” It seemed too wonderful to be true, a circumstance filled with chance and synchronicity.
I learned the word “Zion” when my stepmom laid it down on the Scrabble board and won a hefty triple letter score for the Z. She was cheating of course: Zion is a proper noun, which isn’t allowed in Scrabble play. But I was still in Elementary school and she was still bigger than me, plus she’d just unlocked a wonderful redolent word that meant, she told us, the Promised Land. So we let it lie.
I knew from Passover, a holiday that we celebrated in our curiously hybrid household, that the Promised Land meant Israel, that next year that’s where we’d be and that there was something wonderful about it – a kind of homecoming after much suffering.
I didn’t know that it meant someone else had to leave. I didn’t know it meant someone else had to suffer. I didn’t know it would lead to this »
p.s. Protect the Human »
[1] (Which isn't to say I don't remember the kisses, but they deserve their own post.)
