Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Uh-oh
They say you begin to lose brain cells as soon as you emerge from the womb, that from that point on it’s just a race against time, not to mention a multitude of other threats, before your mind totally capitulates and leaves you to wander aimlessly through what only a few moments before was a reasonably familiar neighbourhood.
Engaged as I am in what might charitably be called “intellectual pursuits”, such as directing plays and editing newspapers, and having studiously avoided for most of my joyless life such braincell-destroying substances as tobacco, booze, coffee, recreational drugs or lobsters, I dared to hope that I might hold on to my mental capacities a little longer than most, that I might continue effortlessly adding up long columns of numbers, for instance, well into my twelfth decade.
After this past weekend, I’m not so sure.
The catastrophe began innocently enough on Thursday evening about 7:45. My wife and I had the honour, as we frequently volunteer to do, of babysitting our grandsons down in Markham. The four-year-old, Declan, asked if Grampy might read him a story before he went to sleep. I was delighted, since Grammy usually gets that plumb job, and asked which of his thousand books he would like to see and hear. He chose The Adventures of Curious George, which for those of you not familiar, is about a short brown simian of indeterminate species who speaks fluent English and is continually getting into trouble.
The particular episode we were to read on Thursday involved bunnies and kites and a few other fun things, but at one point George was attempting to fish with a cleverly jury-rigged pole, and was trying to see what he’d snagged with it when he fell - splash! - into the pond. Thank heavens he wasn’t too far from the village, because he was promptly rescued by a young lad who was strolling nearby.
Now, as with most successful young children’s books, the pages of Curious George have not a lot of words and are mostly filled with colourful and detailed illustrations. What I love about them is that they invariably have lots of details which aren’t discussed in the story, so I can test Declan’s observational skills by asking him questions about them. “What’s that animal in the tree?” “A squirrel!” “What’s that insect hovering above the fence?” “A dragon-fly!” “What’s that thing sticking out of the boy’s back pocket?”
Declan thought about that last question for a moment, but he never wastes a lot of time if he’s stuck. So he looked up at me. “I don’t know, Grampy. What’s it called?” And it was then, with horror, that I realized I didn’t know what it was called, either. Stunned, I stalled for time. “Well, it’s made of wood, but it has a piece of rubber between those forks there, and you use it to throw rocks, like you’d throw paper balls with an elastic band. And in that famous Bible story, a boy named David uses it to kill a bad old giant named Goliath. Remember?”
But Declan didn’t know that story. So I said, “Well, you think about it while I go get us a glass of juice.” So I did. And while I was in the kitchen, madly scrambling around in my brain to think of the word, I went through the motions of using the device (though I don’t think I personally have ever used one), and came up with the word “sling”, and from there it was only a couple of mental steps to come up with the elusive noun.
So back I went to the boy’s bedroom with the juice. “Did you think of it yet?” “No, Grampy,” he said with a touch of impatience, “I don’t know it.” “Well, it’s called a slingshot,” I said, and briefly recounted how it was made, how it was used and how I would tell him the story of David another night. But now it was time for him to go to sleep, and for me to emerge sweating from his room, trying to figure out what was going on with my brain. I forget “capybara” or “hyacinth”, okay. But “slingshot”? Yoiks.
The way I rationalized it to myself on my way home is that “slingshot” is not a word I use a whole lot, either in daily conversation or in the process of writing or editing the Cosmos. Wherever Curious George and his human rescuer live, it’s not Uxbridge, because I can honestly say that in my fifteen years of residency here, I have yet to see anybody use a slingshot on the streets, or even in a park, where it would be marginally less dangerous. In fact, I think if I was to mosey over to Uxbridge Secondary or Joseph Gould tomorrow, slingshot in hand, a vast majority of youths surveyed wouldn’t have a clue what it was. If they did, I could immediately peg them as Baptists with a few years of Sunday School under their belts. And that’s why Declan was stumped, too. They don’t use slingshots on the TV shows he watches.
But that’s no excuse for me. I know about David and Goliath (though I’m pretty sure the Bible doesn’t call the weapon a slingshot - I’ll have to check). I’ve read Huckleberry Finn. I’ve seen Anne of Green Gables a couple of times, where Moody Spurgeon uses the thing on the teacher. So despite my lack of personal experience, I know from slingshots.
So what strange blank in my synapses stole the word from my memory banks at just the wrong time, when my grandson needed it? Just a fluke, I told myself, could happen to anyone. Nothing to worry about.
Not until another part of my mind went AWOL a couple of days later. But that, as they say, is another story.
