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The thousands of words we don't know The thousands of words we don't know
(12 days later)
I use the public library, almost weekly, and stash my haul on my hallway bookshelf. At the moment, on this shelf are several histories, a gardening book and Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, a novel about the abduction of a 5-year-old girl and the unraveling of her parents' marriage – guilt, anger, grief, loneliness. I'm a quarter way through the novel, but I may return it to the library unfinished. Words are underlined in pencil by one of the previous readers who, I suspect, was trying to improve her vocabulary – "deciduous", "reptilian", "affability", "provenance", "slow-loris", "averse".

The underlined words halted my progress and not because of their annoyance. As I'm a poet, thus invariably searching for the right words, I began to consider these pencil strikes. I couldn't help but wonder about the previous reader, "the culprit", let's say. She was female, possibly my age (early 60s), and reflective about the years lost on a no-good husband. Like the dainty pencil marks, she was understated in every way – touch, voice, makeup and clothes. I began to imagine her as reader of admirably crafted contemporary fiction (published in 1987, I still consider this novel "contemporary"). I saw her as a nurse attracted to the novel because of its theme – child gone, child gone. I instantly corrected my assumption and imagined a psychologist – no, that was wrong, too. A psychologist would have known most of the underlined words, as would have the nurse, a bookworm forever on her way to the morning shift by bus?

Who was she?

I assigned her bits of a life story. A widow, she read the novel late at night, with cotton balls in her ears against the noisy neighbor above. A moth batted around the lamp and a cat the color of smoke slept at her feet. No, I corrected this image: she was a recently engaged office worker on her lunch hour in a park with graffiti-marked trees. A duck with a ring around its neck was eyeballing her from three feet away. Did she have anything to give it? No, I was hasty: she was a florist in rubber boots, her breath before her in the cold. She had a surplus of roses in tall buckets to sell by noon.

Conjecture, all of it, for only this I know: a reader had underlined words. In doing so, she perhaps embraced a view that learning doesn't end. She may have been a mail carrier padding about in corrective shoes (this is how I saw her by page 180), but she was not about to give up on her head, now capped with grayish hair.		I use the public library, almost weekly, and stash my haul on my hallway bookshelf. At the moment, on this shelf are several histories, a gardening book and Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, a novel about the abduction of a 5-year-old girl and the unraveling of her parents' marriage – guilt, anger, grief, loneliness. I'm a quarter way through the novel, but I may return it to the library unfinished. Words are underlined in pencil by one of the previous readers who, I suspect, was trying to improve her vocabulary – "deciduous", "reptilian", "affability", "provenance", "slow-loris", "averse".

The underlined words halted my progress and not because of their annoyance. As I'm a poet, thus invariably searching for the right words, I began to consider these pencil strikes. I couldn't help but wonder about the previous reader, "the culprit", let's say. She was female, possibly my age (early 60s), and reflective about the years lost on a no-good husband. Like the dainty pencil marks, she was understated in every way – touch, voice, makeup and clothes. I began to imagine her as reader of admirably crafted contemporary fiction (published in 1987, I still consider this novel "contemporary"). I saw her as a nurse attracted to the novel because of its theme – child gone, child gone. I instantly corrected my assumption and imagined a psychologist – no, that was wrong, too. A psychologist would have known most of the underlined words, as would have the nurse, a bookworm forever on her way to the morning shift by bus?

Who was she?

I assigned her bits of a life story. A widow, she read the novel late at night, with cotton balls in her ears against the noisy neighbor above. A moth batted around the lamp and a cat the color of smoke slept at her feet. No, I corrected this image: she was a recently engaged office worker on her lunch hour in a park with graffiti-marked trees. A duck with a ring around its neck was eyeballing her from three feet away. Did she have anything to give it? No, I was hasty: she was a florist in rubber boots, her breath before her in the cold. She had a surplus of roses in tall buckets to sell by noon.

Conjecture, all of it, for only this I know: a reader had underlined words. In doing so, she perhaps embraced a view that learning doesn't end. She may have been a mail carrier padding about in corrective shoes (this is how I saw her by page 180), but she was not about to give up on her head, now capped with grayish hair.
There are thousands of words we don't know, long or short, soft or clunky, in print or heard in conversation. We can just let them go, like passersby, and we're none the worse because of it. But if we're active, we give new words a try on our own. Who is this person who looks like a dogmatic priest? What sort of fluctuating shopper is she? Where did they get that dubious car? These adjectives may not fit the nouns, but they are attempts. Why don't we forge the refrigerator? Close but not quite right.

In a recent novel, I paused at this sentence: "'she's fly', said Mathew to his best friend, Ronald." "Fly?" I mouthed, quietly confused. Was this a typo? Did the author mean to say, "she's flying"? That wasn't probable because the scenes in the novel were grounded – nothing about planes, terminals and such. I didn't grasp the meaning until I asked a young man, in a bowtie, who said that "fly" meant lovely or pretty or hot. The young man, touching his bowtie, also informed me that the word was out of date.

Oh.

I may finish McEwan's novel – it's very good. But as my eyes rove over the prose, I think of the previous reader as a subplot – nurse, psychologist, florist, mail carrier, a sleuth with a pencil poised. With affability, she turned the reptilian page and, through reading glasses thick as mine, made little aversive checkmarks on her dubious self-improvement. Her cat and a stuffed slow loris watched with provenance from the end of a very comfy and deciduous bed.		There are thousands of words we don't know, long or short, soft or clunky, in print or heard in conversation. We can just let them go, like passersby, and we're none the worse because of it. But if we're active, we give new words a try on our own. Who is this person who looks like a dogmatic priest? What sort of fluctuating shopper is she? Where did they get that dubious car? These adjectives may not fit the nouns, but they are attempts. Why don't we forge the refrigerator? Close but not quite right.

In a recent novel, I paused at this sentence: "'she's fly', said Mathew to his best friend, Ronald." "Fly?" I mouthed, quietly confused. Was this a typo? Did the author mean to say, "she's flying"? That wasn't probable because the scenes in the novel were grounded – nothing about planes, terminals and such. I didn't grasp the meaning until I asked a young man, in a bowtie, who said that "fly" meant lovely or pretty or hot. The young man, touching his bowtie, also informed me that the word was out of date.

Oh.

I may finish McEwan's novel – it's very good. But as my eyes rove over the prose, I think of the previous reader as a subplot – nurse, psychologist, florist, mail carrier, a sleuth with a pencil poised. With affability, she turned the reptilian page and, through reading glasses thick as mine, made little aversive checkmarks on her dubious self-improvement. Her cat and a stuffed slow loris watched with provenance from the end of a very comfy and deciduous bed.
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