Revelation

I had a friend once, she probably would say she still is my friend, and I guess I would say that too, whenever we talk we subconsciously pretend we just saw each other yesterday... But she said I floated on a cloud. She was sort of acting like eeyore, but that's beside the point. She said that things always worked out for me, and I just floated through life on a cloud and everything was flowers & sunshine. She even bought me "The Cloud Book" by Tomie DePaola when she was leaving for home that summer. I really had fun with her, and I thought of her today when something mysteriously worked out and it affected me kind of deeply.

It starts with the memory I have of "putting up corn" in the fall with my family. The day was always planned and executed the same. My grandparents always came for this day, as they did for making apple-sauce, canning tomatoes and freezing green-beans. I don't know if it was that they liked to help, or because we needed their help, but it was the spoonful of sugar that made it easier for the kids to want to help too. We loved it anytime our grandparents came, even if it was to help us work.

My grandparents periodically had words with each other, telling stories on each other, generally bickering throughout the day, and that was entertaining to all of us. Papa used words like yardbird and yoo-hoo, shots at my grandmother's intelligence. He swore to us and they argued sporadically about whether she'd ever earned a high school diploma. Gam focused on Papa's waning memory and his inability to part with money.

One year while putting up corn, we had already picked & peeled all the ears. The corn-stalks had been hauled off to feed the cows, and we were inside now. Dad had the corn boiling on the stove, and Mom, Gam, and Papa were cutting the corn off the ears. It was my job to take the cut corn and put it into ziploc bags, weighing each bag at a pound, I think. I don't think any of my brothers or sisters were around, but I may be mistaken. My grandmother was telling a story that was making fun of herself, I don't remember the story, but I remember in the conversation after the story Papa called Gam a "basket case."

This is where I piped up, "What's a basket case?" My contributions were always in questions, and frequently about the meaning of words that Papa was using. I was very curious about this expression, but no one could define it for me. They could just say that Gam was a basket case, and that was all the context I got.

I kept asking for better explanations, but they gave no more. I decided to guess, and the context I used was that Papa was always calling Gam names that had to do with limited intelligence. So when someone answered me again by saying that Gam was a basket case, I ventured, "What, does it mean stupid?"

I got a quick, amused but disapproving glance from Mom and realized how I sounded. I tried to backpedal, but there was no going back. I doubt my grandparents recall this specific conversation, probably no one does, but I remember it sometimes very clearly and feel uncomfortably hot inside, recalling my embarrassment.

In context since then, I have come to think that "basket case" is someone maybe who panics easily, someone who is a bit flaky, someone who needs help from people a lot.

So today, I was reading one of my favorite books, "How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms." And guess what word I came across? Right there between "Basket" and "Basted" was my word: "basket case."

At first, I assumed I knew the meaning, and I was going to skip over it. The memory of the corn freezing incident wasn't really in my head right then, and the monumental importance of this euphemism eluded me for a moment. However, I decided to read the definition, just to be sure I was right about what it was.

basket case a destitute person or society incapable of self-reliance
this is the container in which food might be distributed as an act of charity. It is used of
a person, or of a nation, and also figuratively:
- The other part of him couldn't understand why a nurse in a nursing
home should be so grief-stricken over death... an obvious basket
case. (Peck, 1990-the arms and legs of the person who had died
had been amputated).

- Poland, which is economically a basket case ...(Daily Telegraph, Feb. 1982)

- I will not print the vulgarities of the third entry in my blog

So, it does follow that my grandfather was again attacking the flaky nature of my grandmother, or as he would put it, "She's a yardbird." I know I am known to be flaky, or I would say distracted; I probably get it from her. I prefer to say that our heads are in the clouds.