Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia (on-o-mat-o-pee’-a): Using or inventing a word whose sound imitates that which it names (the union of phonetics and semantics).

I zipped up my pants and stepped out from behind the big oak tree. I was shocked to see a choir standing there waiting for me to conduct them. I raised my arms and they started singing. They were singing a song about a bus load of unruly kids: “The Wheels on the Bus” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e_04ZrNroTo). I was waving my arms around and it seemed to be working. They sounded great. I should have stopped waving my arms when they finished the bus song, but I didn’t, and they started another song. It was Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (https://m. youtube.com/watch?v=LQUXuQ6Zd9w). The jump from the “Wheels on the Bus” to “War Pigs” was dizzying. It was like “Wheels on the Bus” had been turned inside out and wrapped around a bleeding man.

I bid the choir farewell and ran all the way to the other side of the park, to the lake.

My mother was waiting there for me. It was her 62nd birthday and I had promised to go for a ride with her in one of the swan pedal boats. it was something we had done every year for the past ten years, ever since my father died of a heart attack shooting dice down by the Charles River. He had a set of totally undetectable loaded dice that he had bought in Taipei when he was there on R&R from Vietnam. He had made a fortune with them “rolling the bones” up and down the East Coast. He had some great stories—from the Catholic Priests he shot dice with, to getting into a knife fight with an old man in a wheelchair!

Suddenly, a geyser of water shot up from the middle of our swan boat. There were no life preservers! I threw my mother overboard and told her to swim for shore, all the while yelling “Help!” hoping the boat concession people would help us. I jumped. I landed next to my mother who was standing there. The fake lake was only about three feet deep. We were going to live!

We waded out of the lake and told the swan boat operator we were going to sue him. He told us to shove it, the boat was equipped with flotation devices and never would’ve sunk, and moreover, that the lake was only three feet deep. I walked over to one of the boats and ripped off the swan’s head, and handed it to the proprietor and told him to shove it up his ass. He was totally taken aback and my mother and I headed for the parking lot.

I heard a choir singing a song I’d never heard before. It was about a sunken swan boat. I looked behind me and there was that damn choir I had conducted after I had peed behind the tree. The choir was walking slowly behind us, singing. I turned around and yelled “Stop!” They kept coming toward us. That’s when I realized my mother was gone. Same old story: whenever I needed her she wasn’t there. I hated her. The choir walked through me and kept going. I had become a chimera, or something like that. I felt woozy.

Ah ha! I had entered the cliche-o-sphere again. I had fallen asleep in my comfy first class seat, flying on my way to Istanbul. Whenever I flew, if I fell asleep, I had the choir/swan boat dream. I had had the dream so often that it didn’t really bother me any more. That’s when I realized it was my mother’s birthday. I would call her as soon as we landed at Istanbul Airport.

We landed and I called my mother to wish her a happy birthday. My sister answered the phone and told me our mother was dead. She had been on a date with Ricky Tornado, a hard-drinking, womanizing loser just like our dad was. I took a deep breath and told my sister to take care of things back there, and asked how Mom had died. “She choked on Ricky’s thing. He’s under arrest and might be charged with murder,” my sister said, sobbing.

It was time to go to the steam baths and think about my life.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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