To Coin a Phrase

I spend a lot of time working with words. I write reports for my little business and I write columns for this newspaper. It’s way better than my old job. That job involved playing guitar in bars where people puke in the toilets, then going home to a motel room full of musicians who spent most of their time trying to figure out where to get more marijuana as soon as they finished up the marijuana they had. Now that I’ve put that behind me, I’ve gotten used to  a writing job, and it comes pretty easy to me. I use the same words I’ve been using since I was about 6, and I don’t need to learn any new ones. At most, I just have to learn some new ways to string words together. But I envy the Jowers women—wife Brenda and daughter Jess—because they get to play with words. They invent words, they create new meanings for existing words, and they use words in ways nobody thought to use them before. It all started back in 1967, when teenybopper Brenda went to a Monkees concert in North Carolina. The house lights went down, the stage lights went up, and Brenda got herself ready to see the cute stage-lighted faces of the Monkees. But what she got was two eyefuls of big-afroed, bell-bottomed, scarf-necked, Marshall-powered Jimi Hendrix, who somehow got the gig as the Monkees’ opening act for nine days. Brenda sat wide-eyed and freaked out through a Hendrix set, complete with guitar-biting, guitar-humping and guitar-burning. Here’s what Monkee Peter Tork said at the time: “Nobody thought, ‘This is screaming, scaring-the-balls-off-your-daddy music compared with the Monkees,’ you know? It didn’t cross anybody’s mind that it wasn’t gonna fly. And there’s poor Jimi, and the kids go, ‘We want the Monkees, we want the Monkees!’ ” Brenda was one of the kids screaming, “We want the Monkees!” She hasn’t been the same since. On the bus ride home from that concert, Brenda saw some heat shimmer on the blacktop, and she thought it was water. After the shimmer faded, and Brenda could see that there was nothing on the road but plain old asphalt, she poked her sister, Gwen, and said, “I think I just saw an optional delusion.” I’m pretty sure that the Hendrix set made some meaningful changes in Brenda’s temporal lobes—made her experienced, so to speak. A few months after I met Brenda, she went through a little spell when she wasn’t quite sure about what she wanted to do. She considered taking quite a few jobs, including highway flagwoman, goat farmer and long-haul trucker. One evening, as she ran these notions through her Hendrixized head, she gave me a downcast look, shook her head and said, “I just feel like I’m stuck in a runt.” “That’s a bad situation, sweetheart,” I said. “If there’s anything I can do to pull you out of the shrunken little sumbitch, do let me know.” Years later, after Brenda got out of her runt and settled on the nursing profession, she found that she had an enduring gift for garbling words. Because of some odd turn in a conversation about old movies, she found herself struggling to remember the names of Star Wars characters. “What’s the name of that little round-topped robot?” she asked. Then it came to her: “I know! See-through-D-2!” About the time daughter Jess went into the first grade, she started showing signs that she’d inherited Brenda’s gift. A few months after she saw Forrest Gump, I found Jess sitting at the kitchen counter, staring down at a box of candy and looking a little troubled. “What’s the matter, baby?” I asked. “Life’s like a box of Nerds,” Jess said. “Sometimes you get some green ones on the red side, and some red ones on the green side.” Last summer, on our annual trip to Lake Michigan, we Jowerses stopped for dinner at a restaurant that piped classic rock tunes into the dining room. Soon after we ordered, Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra” started playing. Brenda’s face went pensive for a good long while, then she looked at me and asked, “Are they saying, ‘Have a cadaver’?” “Yep,” I said. “ ‘Have a cadaver’ was a big hit for Miller back in the early ’80s. Everybody digs a good cadaver song. They’re right up there with love songs, dance songs and truck-driving songs.” The next day, after we’d settled into friend Kurt’s Lake Michigan cabin, we Jowerses walked down to the beach to watch the sunset. As the sun reached the horizon, and the clouds turned magenta and gold, Brenda turned to me and asked, “Is Lake Michigan where they had the wreck of the Ella Fitzgerald?” “That’s exactly right,” I said. “You know, that was the only boat ever named after a bebop singer. Your memory is superior.” Just then, Brenda checked the cooler. We were out of beverages, with a good 15 minutes of sunset to go. “I’m going up to the cabin to get reinfreshments,” Brenda said. And so she did.