Congeries

Congeries (con’ger-eez): Piling up words of differing meaning but for a similar emotional effect [(akin to climax)].

“Help, murder, police!” This is what my kid yells whenever I try to give him advice. I think it’s a quote from one of Shakespeare’s plays—maybe “Merchant of Venice.” His mother hears him and comes running yelling “What are you doing to my precious baby boy?” “Giving him advice.” I calmly say. She yells, “Stop tormenting him with your sanctimonious bullshit.” I say, “It’s not bullshit—I was telling him he shouldn’t wear his dress shoes to play in the snow—they’ll get ruined and they’re expensive to replace.”

My wife makes it up the stairs. She’s standing in the doorway of our son’s bedroom. She’s wearing her pink terrycloth bathrobe—it looks like a belted bath towel. It has a spot of egg yolk on the collar and a coffee stain further down. She has a mug of coffee in one of hand and a cigarette in the other. She takes a drag off the cigarette and exhales the smoke as she talks: “Look, Arnie, does he look like he needs your crazy-ass advice? So what if he gets in trouble or ruins a pair of friggin’ shoes he never wears? I’m his mother, and I decide what’s good for him.” I looked at her and said: “Like the time you told him to go ahead and make his own fireworks? Now he only has four fingers on his left hand.” She said what she always said she I brought it up: “Arnie, he’s right-handed, who cares?”

Our son Gomer (she had named him) was on his way to hell. Ruining his dress shoes was another step along the way. He knew his mother would override any advice I gave him—just for the sake of having her way. That’s when I decided to take him somewhere his mother couldn’t get into and fill his head with my advice, which I had written down in a diary to give him. It was titled “Don’t Listen to Your Mother.” I took him to the men’s room at a nearby Thruway rest stop. I started giving him advice, secure in the belief his mother wouldn’t enter the men’s room—especially since we had left her at home. He looked at the diary and yelled “Help, murder, police!” I was held in police custody until I could prove I was his father and had no intention of murdering him.

We drove home in silence.

When we got home, it dawned on me! If I gave our son bad advice, my wife would intervene and give him good advice just to spite me. it worked like a charm until one day when my wife was visiting her mother, the first time she’d been out of house in six years. I told Gomer to use his new toothbrush to brush his teeth and if he didn’t like it to “shove it up his ass.” He yelled “help, murder, police,” but his mother wasn’t there to countermand my bad advice. I had really screwed up. I had to drive him to the emergency room to have the toothbrush removed from his ass.

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

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