Laughing at what can't be changed
There are some words that require a depth of human experience to use properly. Some words just don’t suit a 10 year-old. Some you have to earn.
One summer evening, I watched Reality Bites hidden on the floor behind the couch in my older cousins’ solarium. There’s a scene in the movie where our Gen X heroine biffs a job interview because she can’t define irony.
It stuck with me. I’m always trying out big words and was then too. I was awaiting the day when facetious, idiosyncrasy, hackneyed, perfidious, perspicacious, serendipity, halcyon, apotheosis, and yes, irony could roll off my tongue. Words that captured nuanced elements of human existence.
My favorite quote in Steel Magnolias is Dolly Parton saying, “My favorite emotion is laughter through tears.” Is there a word for that?
Irony was a word I wanted to get right. It expressed something sophisticated. A life philosophy. If you could detect irony, you could laugh at what can’t be changed. What a superpower!
Not far from where I write this in December of 1927, the SS Kamloops went down in a winter storm without a trace. The next year, a bottle washed ashore with a message inside. It said, "I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want mom and dad to know my fate."
The author’s name was Alice Bettridge. Fishermen that spring did indeed find her body on the remote island along with those of several others. They also found some cargo from the Kamloops: crates and crates of candy Life Savers.
I wonder if Alice, frozen and starving, having written her parents, lay back on the forest floor, the snow swirling, sucking on a lime-flavored Life Saver, and laughed.
Your sesquipedalian author leaving you to ruminate upon the cornucopia of verbiage I have so magnanimously bestowed,
Jen
P.S. What lies at the bottom of the lake shaking?
A nervous wreck.
Melpomene Now
Read or listen to my latest short story (a contest winner) in Small Wars Journal.
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