It’s almost a century since my Yiddish-speaking mother stepped off the boat at Ellis Island and into English culture. It did not take long for her to become a stickler for proper language usage, and by the time I came along she could serve as my first arbiter of the way things oughta be.
My father may have been the teacher in the family, but she was the one who taught us that there was not a right way and a wrong way to speak, not a right word and a wrong word to use — just a right way and right words, and we had to know them. She loved the way I excelled at spelling, and she did not tolerate grammatical errors. It was a surprise to many that English was not her first language.
Some of my most poignant memories of her late years are of a confused woman groping to express thoughts that did not jump into her consciousness with clarity. She would stop in mid-sentence, click her tongue, and say, “Ah, what’s that word?” And I would wait, sometimes for a thought that eluded her.
The human brain is an amazing instrument, an apparatus, according to the Devil’s Dictionary, with which we think that we think. Robert Frost called it a wonderful organ, which starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. True, both true, but neither insight is very helpful for a neuroscientist.
What the brain does in Act Five is more unpredictable than earlier in life. Like the rest of the body, it begins to erode at the edges and to act (if I may indulge in a strange analogy) as if it had a mind of its own.
Twice in the past few days I have stopped in a conversation because I needed the concepts of introvert and extrovert, and all I was coming up with were the wrong words: optimist and pessimist. This was not a good sign. It has always been important for me to come up with the right word at the right time.
If I were the worrying type, misplacing a couple of words could have been alarming the first time and an invitation for panic the second time. And many older people, when they forget a word or a name or the location of their car keys, think this may be the beginning of the end. I have thought about these things for years, and I know that the beginning of the end comes early in life.
As it is, I was able to go on with the correct words after an uncomfortable pause, but I began to think it might not be a good idea to live for another twenty years if I lose my vocabulary along the way.
In the allegorical medieval play Everyman, the eponymous central character is abandoned by everything and everybody he thought he could depend on, including possessions, good looks, strength, and relatives. In the end, according to the plot, knowledge is the last friend to leave him, and he can take only his good deeds with him.
This all relates to what a person really is. The modern play (and movie) Whose Life is It Anyway? poses the issue in terms of a sculptor who becomes a paraplegic and who wants to die as a result. As a culture, we are far enough from Everyman to know that we are not our goods, our thoughts, our emotions. Yet, at an advanced age, as our knees give out and our words begin to fail, we each still ask the most fundamental of questions: who am I?
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