Mayne Attraction: In The Spotlight Read Free Page A

myself that I was going to
have to accept that I may never get over any of this, so I would
just have to settle for getting through it.
    I made an agreement with myself to hold on
to the hope that maybe someday, in the far distant future, perhaps,
I could be happy again. After all, wasn’t my mom happy again? I
never would have believed that possible. Of course, right now my
problems were tainting her happiness, and I didn’t want to be
responsible for that. So I needed to start moving forward if I had
any hope of getting to that happy future which I had never
questioned until recently. Although, to be honest, moving forward
with life was almost as scary as dealing with a
therapist…almost.
    One way that I chose to ease back into
normalcy, at least from my mom’s perspective, but certainly not by
any other measure, was to engage her in our thing that we did—just
her and me.
    If I’d had any notion of how strange and
lame it was I would have never played along. But it had always
seemed perfectly normal and fun to me, and now after years of
participation, I couldn’t give it up even if I wanted to.
    It was the peculiar little game of words
that my mom had played with me ever since I could remember. It was
basically a game of word switching where the players replace a
normal word with some random, scarcely known and rarely used
synonym, and then try to understand each other.
     
    My earliest recollections of the game
involved nursery rhymes.
     
    Game version:
     
    Scintillate, scintillate, celestial body
minific;
    Feign do I fathom your nature specific.
    Loftily perched in ether capacious;
    A reasonable facsimile of a gem
carbonaceous.
    Scintillate, scintillate, celestial body
minific;
    Feign do I fathom your nature specific.
     
    Mainstream version:
     
    Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
    How I wonder what you are.
    Up above the world so high;
    Like a diamond in the sky.
    Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
    How I wonder what you are.
     
    I loved it that the game version rhymed as
nicely as the mainstream version, though admittedly, it did not
sing as well.
    Another game, Scrabble, was also a favorite
pastime and one where I quickly eclipsed my mother’s excellent
skills, much to her conflicting maternal satisfaction and
competitive chagrin.
    When I was a very young child, my mother
took great pride in my impressively good diction, which surpassed
that of many adults. Although living in Kentucky as we did, the
triumph of such a thing was somewhat diminished. In defense of my
own kind, I’ll assert that we Kentuckians have numerous admirable
traits and talents, but as a group, speaking with grammatical
correctness isn’t at the top of the list—at least for those whose
jobs aren’t specifically tied to it.
    One of my elementary school teachers
actually thought that I had a speech impediment because I spoke
very clearly yet unintelligibly on occasion. I couldn’t help it if
I was smarter than she was…none of us knew.
    Though, ‘smarter’ was not a fair or even
accurate description. I was just a logophile (a word lover) with
vast stores of minutia in the form of words and their definitions
that couldn’t be used in normal conversations with people other
than my mother. Though she disapproved, now that I was older, and
more self-conscious, I tried to tone the impressive diction thing
down around normal people so that I would sound more normal and
less like a robot or an alien infiltrator. Sometimes, though, I
would catch myself using that ‘alien’ vernacular of mine and feel
obligated to throw in extra words to elucidate (explain
myself).
    One of my favorite tangents of our game had
to do with phobias. There are over five hundred named phobias and
making up a new one is as simple as determining the Greek word for
it and adding the suffix ‘phobia’, which is an entirely separate
and enjoyable game in itself. A side benefit was the addition of
numerous Greek nouns and verbs to my minutia collection.
    Incidentally, I