White Woman Blues

So I'm downstairs playing solitaire, wiggling and jiggling and just hardly able to sit because there's blues wafting out of the speakers. And I ask myself, as I have so many times, how a privileged piece of whitebread like me grew up to love early Delta blues all the way down to her toes? To dream of Mississippi road trips searching for gravesites and juke joints? To stare lovingly at photographs of worn-down, beat-up, poor itinerant black men that died before she was even born, and wonder how they lived, and what they thought, and how they felt? How uppity is that?

Turns out, not all that uppity. 'Cause I got me a bit of a blues life, baby. I truly do. You don't got to be born poor and black in the early twentieth century to have a blues life. I got me a daughter dead at sixteen and a no-good alcoholic ex-husband. I got me a crazy-ass Jerry Springer mother who double-crossed me some five years back, and I ain't spoke to her since, though sometimes it breaks my honky little heart to think I'm a girl whose own momma don't even love her. And even when things is goin' good, I got me a hearty helpin' of recurring depression. That's a fancy word for the blues, baby. Don't never know when it's gonna jump up and strike, neither. (And, as you can see, I got me a visegrip on backwoods Southernspeak. Don't you just wish you could hear me talkin'? I know how y'all yanks love a Southern accent.)

'Course, it ain't all a blues life. I got me a fine third husband and three livin' children who're sweeter than pecan pie. I got me a really sweet home, baby, I do, big and pretty, and I got me some friends, and I know how to read, and I don't got to work to put food on my table. Best of all, I got me a workhorse of a body, maybe a little on the chubby side, but that don't matter in the blues. What matters is it don't never get sick, and it gets me where I wants to go.

That's what a bit of the blues is good for. It makes the rest of life, all the parts that ain't blue, seem mighty, mighty sweet.

Captive on the Carousel of Time

Contractions were getting fierce this time eighteen years ago; after twelve hours I described as bad menstrual cramps, I'd gradually been reduced to leaning against the bookcase and panting. I was some nine hours away from giving birth to my first, wildly excited to meet her and increasingly nervous about the simultaneously epic and ordinary process that would get me there. It was intense, and it took all I had to keep my head above the pain.

In the end, I was up to the challenge of birth. Four times over, I've risen to birth's demands, once seven terrifying weeks too early, once in a much-dreaded but medically necessary c-section. But that first time was textbook. Alas, my daughter's battle with glioblastoma multiforme fifteen years later was also textbook: despite radiation and chemotherapy, she died thirteen months later, just short of the average post-diagnosis GBM lifespan.

Tomorrow, we'll celebrate the day she was born. There will be no balloons and streamers; she isn't turning eighteen, and she never will. But there will be steak and salad, ice cream and jellybeans, games of Sorry and 10,000; maybe she'd have moved on to new favorites, but we'll make do with the old ones. We'll have to.

Yankees, Cookies, & Dollars

That's the catchy little title of a new book by etymologist Nicoline van der Sijs that details the influence the seventeenth-century founders of New Amsterdam (that's New York City to you and me) exerted on America's future mother tongue. As a translator and linguophile (can you believe that word isn't in Merriam-Webster? Well, I'm using it anyway), I can't wait to get my hands on it. Are you listening, Saint Nick?

I'll be reading the Dutch version (take notes, dear Nick), as penned by Ms. Van der Sijs; I want to read what she wrote, the way she wrote it. Besides, I've already seen an excerpt of the English translation, which includes the phrase

...the contributions of the Dutch language to American English are indelibly embedded to some of our most vernacular terms and expressions...

Perhaps it's just me, but I can't quite parse the orange bit; I'd have liked embedded in vastly better. But, as I often diplomatize when faced with linguistic infelicity bordering on outright American error: maybe it's a British thing.

Even the title's better in Dutch; they turned it into Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops in English. Whatever for?

The book debuts in both languages in New York tomorrow.