plus

In the meantime, we ate an awful lot of pies. Three a week at one point. We always sipped tea with it, and he always seemed to find topics for engaging, if somewhat one-sided, conversation. He told me about his grandfather’s dementia. The poor old man was now confusing the details of his own life with those he had read in some biographies of Charles Lindbergh. He told me about his old Latin teacher who chainsmoked and who, one day, soon after retiring, put on a flowered sundress plus a wig, then hanged himself in his study. Maybe he was trying to convince me that he had a stomach for strange stories? Was it the pie or the silence that eased these stories out of him?

Dolores Beekmim
The Broken Teaglass
Robinson Press
14 October 1985
41

Red again. Borrowed books seemed to keep coming up as well, although that detail was less interesting. And then plus. Everything in that one seemed a little random, like it could be from a different narrative. Pie? And who was the “he” with the bizarre stories? The fact that one of the stories involved a Latin teacher made me suspect that plus, despite its random quality, still dealt with the dictionary crowd. It seemed a Samuelson kind of detail, characters with training in classical languages. I also wondered about plus. Surely that wasn’t a 1950 word. I double-checked our list, then the dictionary. The word had been in the English language since the sixteenth century. As an adjective, and then later as a noun. Use as a conjunction, though, had started in 1950. I looked back at the cit. A conjunction. A somewhat awkward one, actually. Someone was being very careful, it seemed, to keep the 1950 pattern. I’d chat with Mona about this later.

I played around with my beauty queen definition for a while, then checked my email. Nothing. I looked at the clock. Two hours and twenty minutes until I could go home. Way too early to take out a magazine and start research-reading for the remainder of the afternoon. I logged on to the Internet again and did a Google search on beauty queen. “Asian Beauty Queens XXX” came up, along with some similar sites. Great idea. Just what I needed right now.

I logged off the Internet and stared at my sorry definition.

Reverse the order, I decided, after a while. That’s it. Start general. Then add the specific sense. I took out a fresh definition slip. “beauty queen n :” I wrote carefully, then chewed the end of my pen for a moment: “a beautiful woman: specif: one who participates in a beauty pageant.”

An improvement, at least. I was pretty proud of myself. I made the other changes Dan had suggested and dropped the folder of cits into my out-box. Then I picked up my next pile of cits. Calibrate. I looked at the clock. One hour and fifty-four minutes to go.