Epizeugma (ep-i-zoog’-ma): Placing the verb that holds together the entire sentence (made up of multiple parts that depend upon that verb) either at the very beginning or the very ending of that sentence.
Driving to Rhode Island was always an adventure. I couldn’t find it on my GPS. Google maps said it was too small for their database and nobody went there anyway. I had an old paper map that I used when I went on vacation there. They still had human toll takers that said “Welcome” when you paid the toll to cross into the state. It was ass-backwards, but if you yelled “Chowda” they let you in for free.
I was headed for Woonsocket. Whenever I said it, I envisioned a giant wall outlet. I couldn’t help it with my poetic sensibility. I stayed in a motel perched on the Blackstone River. I was warned years ago never to even dip my toe in it or my toe would melt off my foot. I thought the motel proprietor was teasing me, but I stayed away from the river anyway, especially when I saw a basketball sneaker float by with what looked like an ankle sticking out.
But I loved Woonsocket, especially exploring all the abandoned buildings and writing poems about them. I wrote this one after exploring an abandoned shoe factory:
“There’s no business like shoe business
It’s like no business I know
It has soles, but also heels
And buckles and bows
So, let’s get with a shoe!”
I wrote this sitting on the abandoned factory floor with my head full of shoe business images, banging away on my I-pad with a parade of motorcycle boots, loafers, wingtips and golf shoes dancing in my head, stomping like step dancers at an Irish cultural festival making me dizzy with poetic inspiration and heating up my I-pad.
This was the essence of my Woonsocket experience. It’s why I came back year after year. But this year, things were a little different. I had met a woman down the hall named Hiney Birch. We hit it off immediately and had dinner at the “Chowda House” the first night we met. I got drunk and chased her around with a live lobster I grabbed from the lobster tank. We were thrown out of the “Chowda House.”
We went back to my room and Hiney recited the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It was fascinating, but it made me thirsty and I fell asleep from a feeling of being becalmed. When I woke up in the morning Hiney was gone and she had checked out of the motel. I was heartbroken until I discovered she had stolen my false teeth from the jar next to my bed.
I opened the door and my uppers were hanging there on a length of fishing line rigged with a large fishing hook with a message hanging from it: “Fishing is wishing. Catch yourself a dream.” I jumped in my car and headed for the beach at Newport. It took awhile to get there. I rented a fishing rod and rigged my uppers to the hook and baited them with a squid.
I waded into the ocean and cast my line. I was going to catch a tuna! A shark! A swordfish! Instead, I hooked into a bicycle someone had thrown overboard. It was great fun reeling it in! When I pulled it out on the sand I realized it wasn’t rusted. It was a magnesium bike! I did some research that afternoon and found out it was a Pinarello Ak61 Magnesium Dogma—the kind of bike Lance Armstrong rode! There was a plastic tag in its tool bag with Armstrong’s name on it! I had “caught” the missing bike from Armstrong’s cheating scandal. I sold it for $125,000 to a film producer making a movie about Armstrong titled “Two-Wheeled Cheat.” Hiney was right—it wasn’t a fish but I had caught myself a dream.
What can I say? Who the heck was Hiney anyway? I’ll never know, but I’ve had my dentures replaced and will be headed to Woonsocket again this summer.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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