Chronographia (chro-no-graph’-i-a): Vivid representation of a certain historical or recurring time (such as a season) to create an illusion of reality. A kind of enargia: [the] generic name for a group of figures aiming at vivid, lively description.
I have had numerous conversations with people regarding my favorite time of the year. I see fall and summer as one season—summerfall. That complicates things, but I don’t care—that’s how I see it. Summerfall goes from May until the first frost. That’s when I call it quits and close my swimming pool after a summerfall of splashing around and basking in the sun smeared with cream that smells like coconuts. After pool closing, it’s all downhill. Everything freezes. It snows, and the world is a mess. I can hear the snowplow at six a.m. as it wrenches its way down my driveway, wreaking havoc on my driveway’s gravel surface. Then there’s the pain in the ass of Christmas—driving through a blizzard to eat Aunt Ida’s cardboard turkey with dressing stuffed in its butt that smells like a dirty dock, uncle Dave’s “special” marshmallow sweet potato glop, my sister Pat’s turnip paste, Aunt Jillian’s raw potato cubes marinated in soy sauce and Nana’s Pelican Pie topped with pimento-stuffed olives.
Nana grew up in Florida, near Miami, in the late 30s when there was a lot of poverty. Her family lived in a lean-to close to a marina where rich people kept their yachts. Her father, my great grandfather, taught her how to sneak up behind a pelican perched on a dock’s piling, grab it by the throat, and strangle it to death.
The “swells” sitting in their yachts were always entertained by Nana’s pelican murder and would sometimes throw M&Ms at her to show their approval. She would pick up the M&Ms and go back to the lean-to where her mother (my great grandmother) would make the pelican into pie. One time when they were pulling out a pelican’s guts and entrails, a gold bar fell out on the floor. Somehow, the pelican had swallowed it. Pelicans were notorious for eating just about anything. But a gold bar? Weird.
They took the gold bar to the bank and had it weighed and valued. Now, they were loaded! They set their lean-to on fire and struck out on foot for Miami. They bought a brand new one-room shack. Great-grandfather invested in an orange grove and became rich. Every year at the Christmas party, I ask Nana where she got the pelican for her pie. She won’t tell me. She just throws a handful of cardboard turkey at me and the annual family food fight begins.
Covered in food fragments, stuffed with Christmas dinner, driving 5 mph toward home in the blizzard though two feet of show, with the wipers and defroster going full blast, skidding sideways toward a stop sign and bouncing off the curb, I think to myself that I don’t have much to be thankful for, but then again, maybe I do. I look at the gift Nana gave me. Since I’m stopped anyway, I pick it up off the seat and tear off the wrapping. It’s a picture of her standing alongside Earnest Hemingway, holding a dead pelican over their heads and laughing. It was signed: “To my soul’s inspiration, Ernie H.”
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99
The Daily Trope 