“Words, words, words.”

Last week I rambled about my relationship with the written word. This week, let’s change gears and take a look at my relationship with the spoken word.

One of my aunt’s favorite stories to tell about me is indicative of my penchant for language. We were having a family dinner at my other aunt’s house, and since her dining room didn’t accommodate everyone, the table had been extended, by means of another, smaller table, into the entry hall. The only light fixture in the entry hall didn’t provide much light, so it was a little darker there than in the main dining room. I was three or four. The first aunt was helping me get into my chair for dinner. Apparently, I sat up on my knees on the chair, looked around and up at the light source, and announced:

“This is abominable.”

Four. Years. Old. It was definitely an omen.

Fast-forward to the sixth grade. Our second play of the school year was Pocahontas, and I played the not-so-nice governor in the first act. (I was a good villain. I still am.) Unfortunately, there was nothing for that part to do in act two, so the director (who liked me a lot) dragged out a hardcover copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare, opened it to Sonnet #18, handed it to me, and said, “Read.”

I read.

The words just tumbled out of my mouth. It was effortless. When I stopped, the whole room was silent. It happened again the following year with a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and has happened back as far as I can remember when I read anything aloud. I have a knack for taking something from a page and making it live.

It’s a big reason why small humans love it when I read them stories.

Sometimes my own words aren’t enough, and I have to turn to those of others; a song, a poem, a quotation. What makes the difference, at least to me, is delivery, in the sense of how a piece of text is spoken. Where someone may emphasize a certain word or phrase, the tone and volume in which they speak--that’s where personality and emotion come through.

There’s a reason I ended up in drama school…

I read at both of my paternal grandparents’ funerals; Sonnet #73 for my grandfather, and an excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes for my grandmother. Both times I was faced with the problem of what to say. To have read something biblical was out of the question--it would have been hypocritical at best, and heretical at worst--and coming up with something original when you’re grieving isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world, so I had to borrow from Billy Boy and Herr Rilke. The two occasions and the readings they inspired came from vastly different sets of feelings. For my grandfather, it was nothing but pure and unadulterated love, and to me that’s what #73 is all about--the love you feel for something in spite of the fact that you know it’s temporary. For my grandmother, well, the feelings were more complicated, and that made finding something to read more complicated. I was in a production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses in college, and one of the sections is the Rilke version of the Orpheus myth. Somehow that came to the front of my mind as I was frantically scrabbling for something that wasn’t twee or overdone or an outright lie. The underlying meaning I took from it in relation to my grandmother’s death was about letting go. A surface interpretation would barrel straight into the literal letting go of someone who has passed on, and if that’s all that anyone in St. Isidore’s got from my reading at that funeral, it’s enough. It ran deeper, however. There are so many things to let go when it comes to my grandmother--not just for me, but I can only speak for myself.

I haven’t let go of all of it yet. I may never let go of all of it. But I have a solid text to return to, to speak out loud when I’m circling the drain of her memory. Giving voice to things can sometimes help you recognize them for what they are and help you see where they fit, and where they might not anymore.

This may be unique to me. It may not. I find it helps. Your mileage may vary. But if you find yourself up against something for which you have no words of your own, speak someone else’s. You may be surprised.