From pillar to post and back again

      It’s about time for another Dairy Hollow (writers’ colony) residency in Eureka Springs. I’ve been going “to the mountains” every autumn for the past five years. It is as gorgeous now as it is in the spring––only different. For three years, BFF Dot-from-Beebe has gone, too. One year, our planned trip to the Florida panhandle was cancelled due to an incoming severe weather event. We were psyched for a vacation, so we found a haven in The Hollow, where we also wrote. BUT, we visited Crystal Bridges as part of our get-away.           

There is an industry trend toward using fewer commas in the print media. Here is an example of a sentence where a comma would have helped me understand the context. “Masked youth wearing black torched cars...” My thought: how does one wear a torched car, even on Halloween?

            Re-reading, I paused—like a comma demands—and got the gist. “Torched” is a verb instead of an adjective. However, “torched cars” is also a possibility.

            If that weren’t enough, I read another headline that used “... OK—illegal ...” which if read rapidly, might give one an eerie feeling. An oxymoronic conundrum? Perhaps I’d better slow down from now on.

            Slowing down will not change the stupidity of the fellow who walked out of a Walmart in stolen jeans, leaving his old jeans and his wallet in the dressing room.

            What an ignoble way for a noble woman to die, especially at the age of 94. Mrs. Helen Wittenberg was pulled from a burning building near the Governor’s Mansion. She died a few days later of smoke inhalation.

            Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine mothers and/ or fathers naming their babies these unusual (to us) names. But there they are, in black-and-white-and read all over: Corney, Cotton, Lawrie, Oswald (female!), Maitland (m), Paskal, Kell, Arnis, Lonzo and Jewell (1916-era),  Roswald, Sundown, Mallard and Lessie, Chessie, Blossom, Ammer, Shenna and Binnie (m).

            I like the way Bill White (Hot Springs Novel Writers) writes. He’s a real journalist and knows that a good column concerns only one subject. I can’t seem to do that very often. Instead, I bounce from pillar to post, from subject to subject. Wonder if it has anything to do with attention spans?

            That said, here is a list of eponyms—words derived from proper names––that have become part of the language: pasteurized: Louis Pasteur; diesel: Rudolf Diesel (German); volt: Count Allesandro Volta; shrapnel: Henry Shrapnel; bigot: Nathaniel Bigot; lynch: William Lynch (18th century); bloomer: Amelia Jenkins Bloomer; and guillotine: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

Maybe bouncing from pillar to post is one method of making sense of things. Or a way of keeping different projects at the forefront of one’s attention. An example: when I go into any room in this house, there is the temptation to straighten that, check this, finish moving that piece, continue “thinning” boxes of old cards and letters and games and school papers and . . .      Now, why did I come into this room?