Word-a-Day, Doggerel-a-Day

The last few years Joyce and I have given our two grandsons (9, 13) a page-a-day calendar featuring a new vocab word every day. It's the same calendar that we have bought for ourselves for decades. But this year, I decided not just to give the boys a calendar but to give myself a little related task, as well.

I decided--oh, about January 4--that I would text them every day with a little bit of doggerel involving the word that day.

This seemed like a nice, grandfatherly thing to do. ("Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Puck cries out in A Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Today is January 23, and, so far, I have stuck to my pledge. It hasn't always been easy, though. Here's my routine. I decided I would not "cheat"--would not look at the word ahead of time. Not until the day of. So each morning when I come downstairs to unload the dishwasher, I tear off the previous day's page to see what new word awaits me.

I think about it a bit as I clean up, dress, and head back downstairs to do a few computer tasks before I walk over to Open Door Coffee Co. to begin my day's work and reading. One of those "computer tasks"--writing a quick draft of the vocab-doggerel, saving it to Word's OneDrive.

Over at the coffee shop--after about an hour of other work--I open OneDrive on my iPhone and look at what I've written. I make changes--if necessary (almost always)--then copy and paste the ditty into a text message that I send to the boys, to their parents, to Joyce.

And then I pretty much relax until the next morning when, walking downstairs, I wonder what problem I'm going to face with the word-of-the-day.

And there have been some. Just in the past week I've had to deal with mansuetude, pusillanimous, prehension, anthropomorphic, and peripatetic.

At the bottom of the page are a couple of examples of what I do--examples that will give you an idea of the "quality" of the verse I'm secreting every day.

So ... will this go on until December 31, 2019? Three-hundred-and-some-days hence?

Who knows? But I'm a-gonna try. Illness and other evils will, of course, intrude and perhaps prevent me one day (or more--or many more).

But, as Miss Emily wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." And, right now, I'm (sort of) flying!

Yes, he was angry—wished to fuss—

But, being PUSILLANIMOUS,

He waited for a little while,

Then fussed in truly awesome style!

He stole a donkey, stung a bee

(Which didn’t make much sense to me),

Befriended every snake in town,

Then changed his town from Green to Brown.*

This fussing made the world so mad

It printed in the sky: “You’re bad!”

So he calmed down and ceased to fuss,

Was once more PUSILLANIMOUS.

Oh, he loved taking walks in the light of the day—

And he loved it at night (which is weird, don’t you say?).

And some neighbors just thought he was weird, old, and crude,

But in fact just a PERIPATETIC old dude!

*Our son and his family live in Green, Ohio.