Giving Birth to Shine Dropular

Sometimes I have problems with words. It’s not so much the words themselves that cause me grief, but the fact that certain phrases become almost intrusive, aggressively butting into my consciousness at the most inappropriate of times. Or even more disturbing, in my hour of need, the right words, the truest specimens of that magic moment where vowels and consonants converge, desert me. They leave me cold, lonely, and – the greatest of all possible evils – inarticulate.

Take, for example, my current ghostwriting project. I’m revising a book written for pregnant women. This particular book is aimed toward women who haven’t been pregnant before and therefore don’t quite know what to expect. The book is conveniently broken into three parts corresponding to the three trimesters of pregnancy, each part offering relevant information for that particular period. As I’m the one responsible for restructuring the book along such a timeline, it was up to me to come up with appropriate subtitles for each part.

The first trimester wasn’t hard.

First Trimester:
“The Adventure Begins”

It seemed to work – it’s simple enough, and yet has that boisterous, exotic appeal. It’s an adventure! And it’s beginning! Isn’t that enough to excite most newly minted pregnant women?

The second trimester subtitle proved a little trickier. I tinkered around with several options.

“The Next Step”

“The Adventure Unfolds”

“The Journey Continues”

It was starting to sound like a sequel to some poorly acted B-movie, so I dropped the Pilgrim’s Progress metaphor and went with a little literary pizzazz instead.

Second Trimester:
“The Growing Glow”

When in doubt, pair alliteration and assonance. Corny? Decidedly. At least it’s better than “The Bumping Hump.”

But it’s the blasted third trimester that has plagued me with the most worrisome quandaries. It’s the third subtitle, so of course it must naturally exceed the other two in wit and sparkle. But how do you sum up the last trimester of a pregnancy? For some reason, these aphorisms keep popping into my head:

“The End is in Sight”

“Your Final Days”

“The Beginning of the End”

“The Last Leg”

“The End is Near”

It suddenly occurred to me that none of these really correspond to the third trimester of pregnancy at all. On the contrary, they correspond to precisely two situations: either someone is dying, or the second coming of christ is at hand. No matter how I cast it, the third trimester subtitle sounds like something scrawled on a sign predicting the Apocalypse. Somehow, “The End is Near” doesn’t bode well for women about to have their first child.

I toyed with other ideas.

“Climax is Nigh”?

Too sexual.

“The Denouement”?

Too esoteric.

“Wrapping It Up”?

Possibly irreverent.

“Tying It Up”?

I like the allusion to the umbilical cord – it might as well be “Tying It Up, Cutting It Off” – but it doesn’t quite have that loving touch.

I am open to suggestions. As a word person, I hate not being able to find the right ones.

All this talk of words reminds me: during a recent haircut, I was delighted to discover that a word I once thought was obsolete still exists actively and happily in the vernacular.

I’ll set the scene.

The haircut was over, and the young girl was putting the finishing touches on the blow dry. She reached over for a fingerful of some gobby stuff and started applying it energetically to my hair.

“What’s that?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Oh, it’s Shine Drops,” she said eagerly.



“Shine Drops? Never heard of them,” I said, my complete cluelessness about all-things-hair shining through.

“They’re great,” she said, smiling. “They make your hair so light and shiny! I don’t know if you use any product” … to which I shook my head … “but if you used any, I’d pick Shine Drops.”

And then, without a trace of sarcasm, she added, “All the popular people like them.”

I must have grinned for half an hour. How fabulous. I thought the word “popular” died out in high school. But thank god, there are still popular people, and they’re out there somewhere using Shine Drops.

New idea for the third trimester:

“Shine Drops Make You Popular!

And good luck giving birth.”

Incidents in the Life of Bree

Snippets from the last three days:

1.

I was driving down I75 (again) when I saw a large white delivery truck ahead of me. I couldn’t make out the words on the side, but from a tall and sturdy pipe a kind of translucent blue powder floated mystically into the air. The powder intrigued me. It was an eerie shade of blue, not unlike the pervasive blue of most suburban living rooms after 6 pm when the magic of primetime casts an unbreakable spell over all of western civilization. But this powder was almost gaseous, iridescent and electric. I envisioned it blanketing the highway as I leapt from my car and reveled in the shimmering stuff, letting it coat my arms and cheeks like feather dust, opening my mouth to find the powder sweet and dry like so many snowflakes.

When I approached the truck, the big letters on the side became visible. They read:

BATESVILLE CASKET COMPANY
Committed to the Dignity of Life.

For ten minutes, all I could think about were somebody’s dignified blue ashes wafting across I75, and how to undertake the dignified process of wiping people-particle off my car hood.


2.

My 8-year-old sister has to write out sentences for each of her spelling words. This usually results in sentences like “The cat is black” and “That is a big boat.” Yesterday she was working on words with the “igh” sound, and the first sentence went like this:

“The girl is high.”

She found nothing funny about this. The girl was simply high, up on monkey bars or a mountain or something.

When does the meaning of “high” change? At what point in our development do we first learn that writing a sentence like “The girl is high” will only elicit stifled laughter from our classmates and a stern reprimand from our teachers?


3.

On Tuesday I became intimately acquainted with the local post office. I waited in line a long, long time, and because (at least on my first trip) I hadn’t wizened up enough to bring a book, I had time for people-watching. I noticed that, besides the two-year-old clasped to his mother’s hip, there wasn’t a single male in the place. Rather, fifteen women of varying ages and sizes formed a line winding all the way out the door, a distinctly female chain that told volumes about the gender dynamics of Christmas package-sending.

A girl behind me, probably in her mid to late twenties and carrying a package wrapped in bright candy cane paper, was having trouble finding stamps. She was having so much trouble that she decided to be vocal about it.

“Where are the Christmas stamps?” she asked no one in particular, staring through the glass case directly at the selection of Christmas stamps.

Nobody wanted to answer, but an older lady, a kind soul, felt obligated to say something. She clutched her manila folder to her chest as she leaned forward. “I think they’re in there,” she said softly, pointing to the display case featuring all sorts of stamps paying homage to reindeer, Christmas trees, Frosty the Snowman, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Luini's Madonna of the Carnation.

Obviously, Judaism and the marvels of Renaissance art weren’t good enough. “But don’t they have, like, Santa?” the girl asked.

Someone coughed quietly and the line shuffled forward.

Moments later, the silence was broken again. Another woman, this one with a brown parcel tucked under each arm, asked what time the post office opened.

“8:42,” Santa-girl piped up eagerly, proudly checking her watch (the time was 9:42).

“What?” the other woman asked, wholly confused.

“8:42,” the girl repeated, pleased to be asked for this highly valued information.

“The post office opens at 8:42?” You could practically see the wheels in the poor woman’s head, spinning round and round and trying to make sense of why on earth the United States Postal Service would recognize such an absurd opening time.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” Santa-girl blundered, “I thought you asked what time it is.”

“Isn’t it 9:42?” came a strong voice from the back of the line. The voice belonged to a tall, no-nonsense woman suspiciously bereft of any envelopes or packages.

“Oh my gosh,” the girl said, giggling. “I’m, like, not with it today. I just got married,” she offered in way of plausible excuse. “I should be more better than that.”

My English major’s soul just shriveled up and died a little bit.

A holiday trip to the post office. Besides colorful Kwanzaa stamps and my newly inaugurated PO box, first class idiocy seems to be the priority.


4.

I bought a pair of shoes in Italy last summer, white with red polka dots. They were looking a little grimy, so I threw them in the washing machine. Now they’re pink with slightly-less-red polka dots. They’re also too small for my feet. Damn.


5.

Before my illustrious Amherst career, I spent a not-so-illustrious three semesters at Collin County Community College (also known as ‘Quad C’) after returning from an unhappy semester at Chapman University in California. As the only student who had ever gone on to a school like Amherst, I was a poster child for Quad C, my image appearing in various magazine articles, on the pre-show slides at movie theatres, plastered to the side of buses, etc. But by far my most substantial presence was on the credit schedule that was sent out to thousands of students and area residents each semester. There I am, preposterously perky in a purple Amherst shirt (purchased expressly for the photo shoot), smiling gaily on the cover of the credit schedule. Because the photographer was too polite to inform me that the white block letters on my shirt were slightly too broad for my chest, I am proudly displaying my future alma mater: “MHERST.”

I never wore that shirt again.

For whatever reason, I am still on the CCCCD mailing list, perhaps as a way to remind me of my roots and ensure I don’t get all ‘uppity.’ However, Quad C isn’t really one to talk; it has recently forgotten its own roots in a sanctimonious display of upptitude. Instead of ‘Collin County Community College,’ it has re-envisioned itself as simply, ‘Collin College.’ Take that ‘County Community’ clean outta there with a carving knife. It’s like coring an apple and leaving two perfect halves, or going straight from conception to post-delivery by just skipping over all that pregnancy and delivery mumbo jumbo. Who really needs the middle part, anyway? Although it cuts the alliterative appeal by 50%, the name makeover eliminates a lot of unpleasant associations, such as “community,” “county,” and “no endowment.” Plus, now they have a cougar! When you want to mask something, go for the mascot, obviously.

But not everything has gone well. Despite the cougar, and despite the new football team which in Texas makes any wannabe college a real college, Quad C (Dual C?) seems to be suffering from marketing gone awry. This image is on the cover of the current credit schedule:



With this call to action:

It’s not too “latte” to enroll

Ouch. Even my flat chest was better than that.