Grammar 101

You know how there are things that you do in your life that are so ridiculous, that even years later you find yourself sitting at your desk typing some sort of memo on official-looking letterhead and bam! it hits you, the sudden flash of memory of the very wrong thing you did. You find yourself blushing, shaking your head, even muttering to yourself things like: “boy, was that stupid,” alone in your office. You can’t, for the life of you, remember what possessed you to do such a thing, to say such a thing at such a moment, and then the worst times - the times you never said anything at all.

This mental-muscle-memory reflex happens to me a lot. Maybe more than most people, (unlike, say, Ted Kennedy’s flashes of Chappaquiddick), because the list of overall ridiculous things I’ve done in my life is long, very long (disclaimer: I am not responsible for any deaths).

It starts probably further back than I like to admit, but the exact moment I can see in my head is the time I incorrectly pronounced “aging” while reading aloud in the first grade. It came out something like “agony” or “gagging” (surely this must be a typo, I thought) because at that time I still didn’t fully understand how a word, age, could suddenly drop a letter and still be the same word but in a different context, aging. My little logical six-year-old brain asked: certainly it should be ageing, no?

But aside from my initial difficulties with the English language (I later went on to major in it in college…scary), I’ve behaved in altogether ridiculous ways: acting before thinking, speaking before waiting, misinterpreting social etiquettes, falling down in the middle of crowds the way I have on several occasions – say in movie theatre lobbies (by far the most famous among my friends), and on the sidewalk outside of my pre-school in those thick white stockings and a pleated skirt, caught on video tape by my father as my black patent-leather shoes that I loved so much got caught up on each other, my right crossing directly over my left as I walked, then landed, then cried.

However I try, as we all have to, to make the best of my handicap and learn from the past. But it’s not so easy when you’re suddenly faced with a situation you’re not sure how to handle, the grown-up equivalent of stumbling across a confusing word while reading aloud. Maybe the answer is that if you want to live you can’t take too seriously the syntax of things. In time, we will undoubtedly make it through our own compound sentences and flailing sentence structure and grammatical errors, (I end up speaking in run-ons). Because while these patterned relations may govern what we do, set the guidelines of who we’re supposed to be, they can’t control the mistakes and regrets and lost truths of growing up.