Just A Word
I’m a logophile - from the Greek, logos - ‘reason, meaning’. I bloody love words. As a precocious young reader, every sign, every package, every label, every book, was a hieroglyphic magnet. As I grew older, wordgames, crosswords, and the stuffier academic realms of semantics were my happy places. But the spoken word was always a little more hazardous, too spontaneous, more approximate, and occasionally downright confusing. The pen is more considered.
I so remember my son’s first spoken word. “Duck”. We were rolling through our local Woolworths store, he in the vanguard in his blue stripey pushchair. His sudden utterance was loud and sharp and clear, almost matter-of-fact in its distinctness. This being such a significant developmental moment, I responded with instant pride and pleasure. He had a new book at home that we both dearly loved, and it involved hunting for a little duck hiding on every page. So - where had he spotted this duck? The more I sought it, the more he repeated it, as I eagerly scanned the shelves: lightbulbs and doorknobs, cups and saucers, yo-yo's and dolls, biros and bears, but no ducks. By now his pitch was rising, a hint of anxiety looming. I dropped to my knees to share his viewpoint, but still no duck. A couple rounded the aisle and came upon our plight, as peering up at them I explained the situation. The D-word by now was punctuated by sobs and a show of tears. My new recruits eagerly joined the hunt, checking every shelf, all the packaging.
Then an elderly woman tapped me on the shoulder to draw my attention back to my small sad son and his true predicament. The tubular aluminium frame of his seventies’ Mothercare chair had obviously been customised to entrap enquiring tiny fingers. The release of the throbbing “stuck” digit was mercifully simple, the gathered duck posse was jubilant, my shame somewhat diluting my pride in his conceptual prowess (an adjective before a noun!) It wouldn’t, of course, be the last oblique communication between us, for such is the approximate nature of perspective and language.
A few weeks later, he would flaunt the next phase in the ancient art of communication, when he would combine words for the first time. During a visit to my parents, he tugged at my father’s sleeve to direct him to a point of interest in the corner of the garden. Indicating a small hole in the wall, he delivered the solemn declaration, “Piders in ere”. For some weeks this was his ongoing pronouncement at every potential nook and cranny. Apparently his enchanted grandfather went around declaring the same edict long after we had gone home, until my mother, a stoicly silent arachnophobe, insisted that he stop.
Many years later, my son long since fledged, I was adopted by a new stray cat. I had lived with many cats before, but this, though delightful, was an apparently mute specimen. He was hard to read for a long time, but we muddled along well enough, as he figured out how to express himself. I learned to detect the psychic window/door-opening stare; to read his complex tail semaphore, and the range of cat collar bellringing entrances: one shake - ‘ I’m here’; two shakes - ‘where’s my tea?’; three shakes -‘ where the hell have you been?’ or ‘it’s raining rats and dogs out there.’
Ten years on, during Covid lockdown, we spent a lot of unbroken time together, and that is when he began to make sounds. Every time I came across him in our shrunken world, I’d begun to say ‘Hello’. Before long, he’d figured that must be his name, and he would emit a casual feeble double meep in reply. How quaint we were. He would bear witness to my frequent episodes of pandemic angst, bustle and blunder, often liberally punctuated with swearwords. Before long, his own primal nocturnal feline zoomies were being accompanied by loud and shouty staccato miaows.
A few years on, he’s found his voice, and of late, he’s been working on a raspy purr. Sometimes he sits on the river wall and converses with owls and otters, and once in awhile, I feel him staring at me and suspect he’s attempting to transmit something profound. Like this morning, when he preceded me into the bathroom, poked his face into a corner under the sink, his tail in straight pointer mode. ‘Wot’s up, Ziggy?’ He looked up and muttered something, his whiskers draped in cobwebs. Perfectly obvious - ‘Piders in ere.’