Hendiadys (hen-di’-a-dis): Expressing a single idea by two nouns [joined by a conjunction] instead of a noun and its qualifier. A method of amplification that adds force.
“Trials and tribulations.” The story of internal strife playing the extremes of being at once yearning and turning locked in the pathological embrace of desire and repulsion as a single point of emotion—two as one and singularly unnameable.
I was having another one of my fits. I was struck every few days by a feeling I couldn’t name or account for. The only thing wrong with my life was my fits. I would hide in my tool shed in my back yard expecting to be attacked by the large beaver living in the culvert under the entrance to my driveway. I do not know where the expectation came from.
I had named him “Bucky” after the toothpaste ad that was on TV. Bucky was a beaver with immaculate teeth. The implication was that he used the toothpaste. Most beaver’s teeth are bright orange. Bucky’s white teeth proved the toothpaste could cut through anything. When the ad came on I’d sing “Brusha, brusha, brusha” and clap my hands while Bucky waved around a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. It was the highlight of my Saturday mornings
Despite my fear, I tried to make friends with Bucky but he backed into his culvert and growled and grunted and bared his horrible orange teeth. Sometimes he slapped his tail on the culvert’s bottom and splashed me with muddy water. That made me mad. He started doing it too often.
I decided to trap him and keep him in a cage. I could feed him the wood chips my dad used on the barbecue grill. I blocked off one end of the culvert with my bicycle. I got a jumbo Have-A-Hart trap at the hardware store. It was big enough to accommodate a wolf. I pulled it home on my wagon and loaded it with wood chips for bait. Bucky was too smart for the trap. He knocked over my bike at the other end of the culvert and took off. Now, he is a fugitive and now I know what causes my trials and tribulations.
At night I hear him slapping his tail on my bedroom door. I’ve caught him several times stalking me on my way to school. I carry a wood chip to cajole him to approach me and make friends, but he won’t. Last night my bed collapsed when I got in it. I looked and and saw that the legs had been gnawed beaver-style. Next, he might gnaw my legs beaver-style and leave me to bleed to death in my sleep. I had to kill him.
I would shoot him with the bolt-action .22 my father had given me for Christmas. I loaded the clip, put one round in the chamber and headed out for school. I would get him when he followed me. The School Crossing Guard told me to drop the gun and put up my hands. The next thing I knew I was arrested for carrying a firearm “on or near” school grounds.
Now, I meet with the school counselor Ms. Sanetino twice a week. She has told me that I am out of my mind, crazy, and around the bend. We talk mostly about her “piece of shit” husband and her lousy pay. But she did tell me, laughing, that I have beaver phobia and it will intensify as I get older.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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