My wife, Dody, has
her own way of saying things. When she says, “The rumor spread
like wildflowers,” she means it spread like wildfire. A friend
of ours, lady who wrote soap operas for a living, said she didn’t
believe Dody went to college at all, much less graduated from
Rice University, “the Harvard of the South,” with a major in English.
But she did, just as I had five years before her, only majoring
in chemistry. Well, technically, she didn’t graduate from Rice
University. It was Rice Institute when she went there. And she
has the diploma on the wall to prove it.
And I helped her through
her freshman year, sort of. By the time she went I was working
for a Houston newspaper and wrote English papers for her. And
she got ones, the highest grade at Rice, for them. Then I got
mad at her for some reason neither of us can remember after 60-plus
years and wouldn’t do it any more. So she wrote them herself.
And got ones. (Years later, in the Eighties, when I was writing
a column for that same newspaper, she wrote three of them for
me but I gave her credit for them and for the third one even passed
along my stipend to her.)
Anyway.
In our family, things
like “it will spread like wildflowers” are called “Dodyisms.”
They are spontaneous
and pop out when least expected. She never knows she has committed
a Dodyism unless someone laughs and even then she doesn’t think
it a big deal. When she said “spread like wildflowers” and I laughed,
she said, “What’s so funny?"
“It’s supposed to be
‘spread like wildfire. ‘
”She said , “I don’t
see what’s so different.”
Same with “It’ll sell
like a hotcake.”
“Hotcakes,” I said.
“Same thing.”
We are watching a
TV interview with a very shifty politician. Dody says, “I wouldn’t
trust him with a 10-foot pole.”
We are at the last
movie the late Sir Ralph Richardson ever made. When he comes on
the screen she leans over and informs me, “They must have made
that before he died.”
She is reading an article
in the Los Angeles Times about a hamburger chain illustrated with
a photo of its dowager empress.
“She looks so old,”
Dody says, ”and she’s only my age.”
Dody is 80.
When she was doing
volunteer work for Planned Parenthood, interviewing patients for
the doctor, she came home one evening and described this large,
muscular patient she had interviewed that day. “...and she had
tattoos on all her arms.”
When our son the veterinarian
was a kid campaigning for a bicycle, he did something that riled
her and she said, “You keep talking thataway (she was born and
bred in Texas, as I was) and see how soon you don’t get a bicycle.”
And there’s “His hair
stood on edge.” And “Her throat goes away and comes back,” to
describe how a daughter-in-law’s voice would be hoarse in the
morning but gets all right later in the day. Not to mention saying
some shoes were “the longest pair I ever had,” meaning the oldest.
And “not a fire was shot” and “He’s made money hand over heels,”
and meeting an actor we liked at a party and telling him, “We’ve
always been your favorites.” Then there’s “I feel like I’ve been
wrung through a barrel.”
When she says “You
have to hand them to me,” she was not asking she be given something
but boasting just a little--”You have to hand it to me.” Of an
appointment with our ear, nose and throat doctor, “I’m taking
my ears in to be examined.” And what the whole family says now
when someone isn’t feeling well, “You don’t look good out of your
eyes.”
What do you think she
meant when she said “the cup is upside out?” Upside down, of course.
“You put your shorts in the wash backward.” Inside out.
On a trip to Hong Kong
she had some slacks made and didn’t have time for a second fitting
before we flew out. Walking away with the slacks in a shopping
bag she said, “If these pants don’t fit I’ll have a fit.”
The other day we were
driving and a passenger in the back seat noticed the windshield
was dirty and said, “Don’t you have water?” Meaning a windshield
washer. Dody knew exactly what he meant and said, “Yes, but I
don’t have any water.”
We were lunching at
a fast food joint with our New York granddaughter, then 12, when
Dody mention Neal Simon’s latest play, “Biloxi Blues.”
“What’s it about?”
the granddaughter asks.
And Dody says, “Remember
that play we didn’t see? It follows that one.”
This quirk, I think,
if it is one, comes from her genes and is passed on from generation
to generation. Dody’s father called the A&P Store the P&A and
said “Escaloopian” for “Episcopalian.” And after a presidential
election the 12-year-old granddaughter asked, “Did Nixon win by
a landslaughter?”
Whatever it is that
causes Dody to fracture metaphors and mangle similes, it is compensated
for by an encyclopedic memory for trivia. When I was TV editor
for the newspaper hardly a day passed when I didn’t call home
with a question to help me get through a column. The one I remember
best, because I had a block about an actor’s name that persists
to this day, was “Who’s that actor I like I always get mixed up
with Jack Warden?”
And she said, “ James
Gregory,” the name I was looking for.
As a matter of fact,
when I wrote this, I had to ask her again, “Who was the actor
I liked I always got mixed up with Jack Warden?”
After 40 years, she
still remembered.
