Category Archives: assonance

Assonance (ass’-o-nance): Repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words.

Anthracite coal, black, blue—along the veins, vine-like lines of my shining quarry.

It’s dark and damp below the earth. My dim lamp light barely shows the wall. I drill and plant my dynamite, wire it up, step back and blow it. The coal scatters all around and I shovel it into my coal trolley and start to push it to the mouth of the mine.

I hear music coming from deep in the mine. How can that be? It’s Tennessee Earnie Ford singing “16 Tons.” It was a sort of Union organizing song. Here’s a few lines:

“You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.”

What was going on here? Coal mining had gone to hell years ago. There wasn’t much money in it any more. Was I hearing things? I was going to find out. All my colleagues were standing there, frozen in time, carved coal statues. They couldn’t talk. They couldn’t move.

I jumped into a trolley and started the ride down. It seemed like I was going 100 MPH. The walls of the mine shaft were a blur. I couldn’t slow down or stop. The veins of coal turned into smiles and I could hear Tennessee Earnie laughing like a big bass drum.

I got to the bottom and hit the wall hard. I bent my helmet and cut my hand. I was briefly knocked unconscious. When I woke up I was sitting against the wall with a battery-powered 45 RPM record player sitting in front of me. When I woke up, it started playing “16 Tons.” There was no Earnie there, only a portable record player. I turned off the record player and saw that the record was autographed by Earnie. I grabbed the record and stuck it in my jacket. I didn’t care where it came from. It would be worth a lot of money. At that moment, the record player disappeared. I felt my jacket and the record was still there.

A shaft of coal rose up from the floor. It said, “Take the record son. Sell it. Send your kid to college. Don’t make him come to work down here.”

I sold the record for $150,000 to the Tennessee Earnie Ford Museum. My son graduated from UPENN and became an accountant for a grocery store chain. He hates his job. On Saturdays, he dresses up like a miner and digs holes in his back yard.

Definitions 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.

Assonance (ass’-o-nance): Repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words

“When the going gets rough, you better start rowing.” This insightful saying is based on our experience fishing for mackerel and flounder in Little River, a narrow inlet that serves as home for lobster boats and pleasure boats hear Ocean Point, Maine. We were too poor to afford an outboard motor, so we rowed. Our rowboat was a 14 foot flat bottom work boat. It had belonged to my grandfather. It was rumored that he used it to offload Canadian whiskey during Prohibition.

There was a bullet hole in the starboard gunwale and and the slug was embedded in the port gunwale. My grandfather told me the bullet skinned his knees as he was returning to shore with four cases of gin. But my mother told me it was an irate husband who had taken a shot at him as he fled his yacht, caught “enjoying” the man’s wife on one of the fighting chairs. Luckily Grampy had tied his rowboat on the opposite side of the boat from where the husband had landed and tied up. While Grampy rowed like a 500 HP Dodge Hemi, the husband rummaged around below, looking for his .30-30. By the time he found it, and got off a shot, Grampy had almost rounded the point. It was a close call, but Grampy had many similar close calls, until he fell to his death while varnishing a spar at Hedgedon’s Boat Yard. His last wish was for a Viking burial—his corpse set adrift in a burning boat. My father found a beat up old boat in somebody’s front yard that had been turned on its side and made into a flower box. He dumped out the dirt and flyers and threw the boat into the back of his truck, stealing it from the “summer puke’s” yard. He wrapped Grampy in a sheet of canvas secured with tire chains, threw him in the boat, doused him and the boat with gasoline, and hauled the boat to a secluded cove on the Damariscotta River.

The family gathered at the cove at sunset to see Grampy off. They launched the boat in the river and gave it a push. My grandmother said, “I hope you get eaten by crabs.” Dad threw a match and Grampy and the boat went up in flames. The tide was going out, so the flaming boat took off down river. It was about two miles to the Atlantic Ocean.

A passing Coast Guard cutter saw the flames and pulled toward shore for a closer look. They saw the burning boat and the gathered people. The cutter’s Captain, using a megaphone, ordered everybody to raise their hands. They were under arrest. Everybody ran like hell through the woods to where they had parked their cars. This was before the days of DNA, so they made a clean getaway and Gampy sank to the bottom near the bell buoy at the mouth of Little River, where he was eaten by crabs.

But, here we were now in Grampy’s boat—I had inherited it from my father when he left home and never came back. He had used the rowboat to take summer pukes out to Fisherman’s Island to look for detached lobster buoys, and in July, to steal baby seagulls from their nests. We named the boat Leaker—we spent as much time fishing from it as we did bailing it out.

Anyway, we were going to catch some flounder. The tide was perfect. We had plenty of bait. We were ready to catch some fish! Then, the wind started blowing, making whitecaps and roughing up the water something fierce. “Leaker” was making creaking sounds like she was going to fall apart. It was time to get the hell back to the dock. I remembered the saying: “when the going gets tough, you better started rowing.” I ROWED! I rowed like a double-triple maniac.

We made it to the dock, tied her up, and walked home just as it started to rain. .

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.

Assonance (ass’-o-nance): Repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words

I shot my snot across the room, sticking to my mother’s tomb it swung in the candlelight, I didn’t handle it well. Visiting my mother’s tomb has become a funny thing. The family stands there feeling no remorse for letting her die in pain, of neglect in her room, alone. In fact, we often break out in laughter.

This is a lesson for those who would be hated.

Mother was a horror. All three of us children were beaten every day with a length of lead pipe, three hard whacks per day. One on the butt and two on the back of the legs. She fed us four slices of baloney, with mustard once a week—on Sundays. In addition, we would have a mug of hot lemon water. I considered this my dessert.

For clothing, she knitted us “sheaths” out of wool. We were all boys—the three of us. The wool sheaths were very embarrassing to wear. They looked like dresses. The wool was undyed, so we looked like sheep. Mother would “herd” us around the house barking like a sheep dog and making us “bleat” by poking us with her crook and snagging us around the neck. Then, before bed, we had to line up in front of our bedroom door and recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

We had no idea where mother’s obsession with sheep came from. My brother Teddy, who was the littlest, loved being a sheep. He loved saying “What’s so baaad about this?” Well, it was pretty bad. At school we were mercilessly teased. The principal did nothing. He loved my mother, and rightfully so: she was beautiful. Then it happened. We found a copy of “The Three Little Pigs” by accident in a cardboard box in the garage. Although the story didn’t perfectly fit our predicament, it was close enough. The biggest one of us, Carl, would pound on the door in the middle the night and yell “I am the big bad wolf and I’m going knock the door down and eat you.” We hadn’t thought beyond that, but we did it. When Carl yelled, Mother came running out of her room yelling, “Eat the three little sheep!” She slipped and fell down the stairs. She was unconscious. With much effort, we dragged he back to her room and tied her to her bed. That’s where she died one year later, it was disgusting, but necessary. The coroner determined that she died from an eating disorder. We were free!

Before we left the tomb, we recited “Mary Had a Little” and and each threw a rock at mother’s crypt.

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.