aardvark (aard⋅vark)[ahrd-vahrk] –noun a large, nocturnal, burrowing mammal, Orycteropus afer, of central and southern Africa, feeding on ants and termites and having a long, extensile tongue, strong claws, and long ears.
My house has always overflowed with books, and by "my house" I mean all the places I have ever lived, from my parents' home in the Valley to my dorm rooms in San Diego and Dublin, to my apartment here in Japan. The only place that I have lived that didn't share this characteristic was my grandparents' home, where we stayed for six months when I was 10, while our house was getting remodeled. (If you are symbolically-minded, like I tend to be, this fact is the nail in the coffin, or the nail that wasn't hammered into the horseshoe, whichever image strikes you as more in the vein of "Danger, Will Robinson, danger!")
Anyway, aardvarks. When I was a kid, my dad used to read this book to us called "Aardvarks, Disembark!" It was a picture book, with animals listed from A to Z, the premise being that Noah was calling all the animals to get off the Ark after they survived the Great Flood and then had to get down to the hard work of repopulating the Earth. Things tend to stick with my dad; he takes a line from a movie or a book or an inside joke from a million years ago, and inserts them into everyday conversation, until you find yourself repeating these nonsense phrases, too, and it gets to the point where you don't even know what it's in reference to anymore. "Aardvarks, disembark!" was one of them. He faced the problem that I think is universal for parents: it's almost impossible to get your kids into the car at the beginning of whatever journey, no matter what length of time (a quick run up to Target being the equivalent of an eight hour drive up to Lake Tahoe in the mind of children under the age of 10). At the same time, there is the same impossibility, upon arriving at any given destination, to get your kids out of the car in a timely fashion (again, there is the failure to discern the difference between, say, a day at Disneyland and an appointment to get your teeth cleaned). I am sure this infuriated my father, he who would rather park a mile away from the mall's entrance so as not to waste time circling the lot. He took to saying, "Aardvarks, disembark!" after he parked the car, partially because it was clever and funny and we giggled and partially because (I suspect) he was trying to mask his frustration--what is so difficult about unbuckling your seatbelt and getting out of the car??--with wit and humor.
Annabelle (An⋅na⋅bel) [an-uh-bel] –noun. a female given name. Also, An⋅na⋅belle.
əˌbɛlAnnabelle was my Cabbage Patch doll when I was three, four years old. I don't know if Annabelle was the name she was given and I kept it, or if I decided on the name myself, but I know that I was very attached to her as being Annabelle-esque. I would put bandaids on her cheeks and push her around in a doll stroller, which was also big enough to hold my little sister. There is a picture in my parents' livingroom, me in a pink dress, standing in the kitchen with its awful yellow-patterned linoleum, the double doll stroller in front of me, with my sister squirming to get out of the front section and Annabelle lying peacefully in the back. I am smiling and gazing off to my right, and my sister is looking at the camera with a look of consternation on her face, like, Are you really allowing this travesty to occur? I am embarrassed for myself, I am embarrassed for you, I am especially embarrassed that this is being recorded for posterity. This is ridiculous.
Anne of Green Gables. A bestselling book by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery published in 1908. It was written as fiction for readers of all ages, but in recent decades has been considered a children's book.
My mother had a rule, and while I'm sure she intended to have it apply to all of her children, it mainly impacted me, her eldest: I was not allowed to watch a movie adapted from a book if I had not yet read the book. One of the first times this actually impacted me in any real way was when the movie version of Anne of Green Gables was wildly popular among the girls of my tiny Christian home-schooling collective. I remember, with all the hyperbole that naturally comes with childhood reminiscing, the begging, the pleading, the gnashing of teeth over being allowed to watch this movie, please-Mom-everyone-else-has-seen-it. She was a good mother, and was thus unwavering in her decree, and thus I was cruelly forced to read a book that became treasured, loved, read again and again and integrated into my imagination and memories like only the best books can be.
I loved having pen-pals, getting decorated envelopes in the mail--getting anything in the mail--and I still have so many letters from my very best friend, my "bosom buddy," as we used to call ourselves. I became "Anne with an E" because my name contains "ann," and she became "Diana" because her middle name was Diane, and we transformed our sheltered suburban lives into melodramatic tales of woe and high adventure.
We went on to write short stories together, brainstorming and outlining and naming and outsourcing to her junior high "boyfriend" for illustrations. We constructed elaborate imagination games in her house, listening through the vents to the adults talking downstairs and making them apart of some sinister, evil plot that we had to escape. One afternoon, after a joint family brunch, we decided that it was all simply too much to bear, and we ran away, and made it all the way around the block before deciding that we should at least leave a note detailing the reasons for our departure. She is probably the only one in this world who understands why I eventually did run away, clutching to my newfound adulthood to justify my independence, why I separated myself from that world and that life, because she did, too.
anonymity (an⋅o⋅nym⋅i⋅ty) [an-uh-nim-i-tee] –noun, plural -ties.
| 1. | the state or quality of being anonymous. |
| 2. | an anonymous person: some fine poetry attributed to anonymities. |
I am an unabashed word and grammar dork; I think one of the reasons I find it so hard to learn another language is a) I am absolutely in love with the English language, b) I hate not knowing the exact word to use in any given situation, and c) learning a language requires that humility, to admit that you have a limited vocabulary, that you might bungle the pronunciation, that you can't immediately talk about politics and philosophy and religion and get into the grit of it all. This is a common thread, this fear of learning something new because I will not automatically be a master of it. It's the reason I hated piano lessons (why play when you know that it will be years before you can play Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas?) and the reason that I find it almost painful to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and sketch something. Writing, words, has been the one exception to that fear of failure--I have kept journals, started newspapers, written short stories, attacked 40 page papers with glee.
So it is with some trepidation and a lot of shame that I admit this: I cannot, for the life of me, say the word "anonymity." I have to sit there and think about it, and even then, it comes out stilted and mangled and I blush as a result.
