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Who knew I’d have such a handy new example of onomatopoeia before the day was done. So here’s what happened. Sometime after 8:00 p.m. yesterday evening I was happily dressed for bed, warm and cozy in my white plush bathrobe, my bed pulled back and ready, as I was enjoying my daily phone conversation with Harriet in Maine. In case you wonder who that is, she was with me in 1951 typing on the SS Volendam as reported in the previous entry posted in the wee hours of this morning — my college roommate.
As we proceeded with our reports of daily activities I was distracted by an occasional chirp. She could hear it too. Chirp, chirp. No, not a bird in the apartment – but a signal that the smoke alarm wanted a new battery. Not a good thing on a Friday night when the weekend was upon us and all who might help would have gone home. But I was lucky. A call to the Concierge put me through to a guy working in the special care area. “I’ll have to charge you,” he said. “I’m willing to pay,” I replied, “if you’ll just charge the smoke alarm and stop the chirp– anything, anything!” Fortunately he was tall enough to reach the high ceiling with the help of my step stool. He changed the battery and started to leave when I heard it – chirp, chirp. He went back and touched some magical spot. The chirping stopped.
The next two hours were peaceful and I called to assure Harriet that all was well. – until I began to hear it – chirp, chirp. No, I wasn’t hallucinating. But all I got when I called the Concierge number was an offer to leave a message. Now my nervous system was going ping, ping as I scrambled through my travel stuff looking in vain for ear plugs. There could be no sleeping with that chirp, chirp, so I real quick threw on some clothes, grabbed a warm blanket, let my door bang quietly closed, clicked the lock fob in the door, and headed for the sofa recently placed in a corner of the atrium.
Not good for my back, and too much light slapped at my eyes, so I tried a darker area of wall seats in the café. No room for my left arm, and besides, some resident I didn’t recognize came by and chatted a bit. I don’t think either of us understood what the other was saying, but he commented to one of the special care nurses as she passed by on her way home, “I’m just chatting with my friend.”
One last thing to try – a deep squishy pink puffy lounge chair in the darkened community room that was really quite out of place with the other furnishings, but maybe I could sink into those cushions and get comfy somehow. First, though, one last try. I instructed my Siri, a nice guy in my phone who sometimes says things like, “You’re welcome,” to call the Concierge. My hero answered, Kelsey the head nurse, apparently on night duty. “I’ll meet you in the apartment,” she said, and she did, as my lock fob was producing an opening ping.
Also very tall, she released and lowered the chirping alarm and declared it needed to be replaced. “I’ll take it with me,” she said, “and Nate will replace it on Monday.” “Just so it stops chirping,” I pleaded. “It won’t stop chirping,” she grinned, “but you won’t hear it.”
“Now I can sleep,” I thought. “A cup of unsweetened warm chocolate almond milk with a fistful of raw cashews will help.” Maybe the big mistake was slipping a bit of bourbon into the cup. Whatever, my ears armed themselves with invisible guards just in case the chirp should start up again. It didn’t, but I did get a lot done, along with the preceding blog entry, when I finally gave up on the hope for sleep and did a bunch of stuff at the computer.
And there you have it – what my daughter would call a “first world problem.” One way to avoid eyes snapping open with concern for so many suffering real problems. Next time someone asks me to think of something I’m grateful for, I’ll remember the removal of the “chirp, chirp.”
And there you have it. A nice, meaningless entry with no important message to convey.
The following is a result of the assignment for today’s (Friday, April 4, 2025) gathering of our writers group here at the Waters of Excelsior. If you remember the meaning of “onomatopoeia” just enjoy patting yourself on the back. If you don’t remember, then you’re in my boat. I needed a reminder. Anyway, here’s the definition: Onomatopoeia refers to words that imitate or represent sounds, like “hiss,” “buzz,” or “bang.”
And here, for your reading and listening pleasure, is what I wrote to include illustrations of onomatopoeia.
“June, 1951
The SS Vollendam crunches a few times against the dock in Rotterdam as ropes bump and release it closer to its resting spot, finally tethering it, slowing the slosh, slosh of the water’s agitation. The somewhat rattly pinging of the large company clock calls out the arrival hour, adding to the cacophony of motors revving up to large containers slapping the deck as they fall into place. Screeching winches hoist them onto heavily breathing trucks groaning a low, rumbling drone as they cut through the air on their way on access roads pausing in peace for a moment. A horn toots, anticipating their explosive gassy pop as they exit the pier. Voices clash into each other as workers shout commands. Somewhere the almost musical ping, ping, ping of a European emergency siren swoops the air, unlike the soprano rise and fall of an American get-out-of-the-way warning sound. Out of sight the harbor pilot skims through the breaking waves, its guidance job done.
Inside the bowels of the ship, we volunteers rush to complete documents that must be presented to shore authorities before gates will clang open revealing the disembarkation route down the slightly swaying squeaking gangplank. The click, clack, of fingers slapping the mounted keys on the contemporary Underwood tap back and forth between the zap of the carriage and the rip, swoosh of removal of the completed page.
And then it’s done. The push of Mona’s heart banging her ribs from inside celebrates the processing arrival in Europe to begin the frighteningly exciting eleven week journey to Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Holland, and Belgium.”
I’m exhausted. If only I could get my empathy under control! I’m sure you don’t expect such personal stuff in a blog, but here goes anyway, I get to sleep a nice solid three hours (two REM cycles worth) before waking up. Then it starts. The students who thought they were exercising a free world right when they became involved in protests — now captured, removed to remote sites, separated from families and friends and their graduate programs. Tortured body positions of Venezuelans transported to El Salvadoran prisons, books banned, colleges and universities yielding to political pressures, history rewritten or simply blacked out.
Putting it all together, the purpose of my life and career seems to have become a target. Appreciation for knowledge, science, the value of all human life, the health of our earth and all the people in it, a world of peace for children/people of all colors, the value of the individual …
Oh, for goodness sake, Mona! Be real. Those are just goals – fictional finalisms to use Adler’s term. Of course you know the world isn’t like that! Yes, I do. But in the middle of the night I realize that not only are efforts to support them fading, there are truly pressures being applied to denigrate them. And there are personal examples aplenty to keep my emotional and intellectual intelligence on edge.
So, what do I do about it? First of all, I know that sanity requires finding areas where one has control. And lying in bed with negative brain worms crawling around my brain doesn’t help, so my go-to aid is getting out of bed, preparing a comforting cup of warm sugar-free chocolate almond milk and a handful of raw cashews. I’d say that works about 60% of the time. There are other options too that sometimes work: Tylenol PM, Melatonin, acetaminophen. But bottom line is choosing to focus on that over which I have some control.
And that takes me to my prediction for future entries here: my manuscript, tentatively titled How Could These Lovely People Have Let it Happen?: a Psychologist’s Intimate Journal. I’ll be letting you know what I need from you …
And now I have to walk for half an hour before dinner and get ready for a writers group that meets tomorrow.
Thanks for listening/reading
Just to be safe I checked the definitions of the words I’m about to use. I challenge you to find definitions that contradict what I say here.
And why should we care? Because we live in a society where we want the comfort of clear dichotomies: divisions or contrasts between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different. In other words, we like to think in terms of opposites like male-female, good-bad, honest-dishonest, you name it.
Politicians propose laws that require oppositeness, literally enforcing differences that don’t exist in nature. In other words, there are areas where we must distort the truth in order to live legally. Or maybe even to live at all.
So what, really does opposite mean?
Adjective: diametrically different; of a contrary kind; completely different.
Noun: a person or thing that is totally different from or the reverse of someone or something else.
Right now I’m thinking of the political inaccuracy of pretending there are only two sexes: male and female. It’s just not true. Like everything else you can think of, the characteristics exist on a continuum. So, I repeat, in order to live legally one has to behave like a round peg trying to fit into a square hole. If we lived without such control – i.e. were truly free – differences could be dealt with in healthy ways with full understanding.
Oh but, you’re going to argue, at least black and white are opposites. Look it up. They aren’t.
What you see as a pigment with a black color or a light with a white color actually contains various light or dark colors. Nothing can be pure white or pure black, except unfiltered sunlight or the depths of a black hole.
What a free world it would be if we lived with reality instead of imposed dichotomies.
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Walking, talking
But not at the same time.
I remember when I could walk
Without knowing I was walking
I promised this for yesterday, but here it is today and I’m just barely making it. Where does the time go? Anyway, here’s the story. Remember, I’m in Europe in 1951 while the effects of WWII are still obvious. And it’s about the letter I received from my brother who was back in the states, a civilian after his wartime service, especially useful because of his excellent ability to speak and write German.
I received a letter from him while I was in Germany. When I opened it there was a photo of his daughter, my little niece Nancy, framed by a cut out section of paper, At first I thought it was a creation of my clever, creative, and funny big brother, but then I realized a whole segment of his letter had been removed, a victim of the Russian censors in Linz, Austria where, by the way, my brother had served his last years in the service. What a feeling! And to think this censorship happened all the time to the people around me. What a terrible experience, never to know what he said to me.
Of course, I was fortunate to be returning eventually to the United States, the land of the free, where we would never experience censorship. I would find out what he had said. But what a feeling, a whole piece of what I should know had been taken away from me.
In spite of our German guide who had warned, “This will come to your country someday,” I had never imagined censorship would come to us, banned books and all, including historical topics to be excluded from our public schools.
Twenty-one in 1951, fresh out of college with a major in Psychology, I spent eleven weeks in Europe with a National Student Association tour: Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Holland and Belgium. We experienced for ourselves what had only been disturbing photographs in our local US papers. Broken men, buildings turned to rubble, shortages of things like water and paper, efforts at rebuilding. With a degree of understanding of the German language, thanks to a super high school teacher, I had thought it made sense to plan on buying a book by Freud in his original language. It would be fun to see how easily I could read it. That’s when I learned about removing people from one’s history. Freud had gone the way of book banning and burning, nowhere to be found. Not even a glimmer of recognition of his name, or anything buried deep in bins of books waiting to be filed. Just plain gone.
How could those lovely people I was meeting, admiring, and enjoying have let it all happen? The question has followed as a theme throughout my career and I’ve discovered that part of the answer is “slowly.” So, when I read that the names of people like Colin Powell and other black heroes had been removed from the list of those buried in Arlington cemetery, my senses were alerted. Already concerned about book banning in my own United States I was ready to jump on the bandwagon of concerned Americans. Before running with it, however, I checked with Snopes. I didn’t find a clear “No, it’s not true,” but rather a long and detailed account of the reported event, with a conclusion that the report wasn’t entirely true. I’m including the link here.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/21/colin-powell-arlington-cemetery/
Tomorrow I’ll tell a quick story about receiving a censored letter from my brother while I was traveling that summer.
olin Powell
I just finished reading another long analysis of why the Democrats lost the election. It’s a good thing I never laid claim to being a Political Scientist because I am just plain totally confused. There are conservatives who nonetheless agree with some liberal priorities, and liberals who feel strongly about conservative ideas. So which is which? And just what is it the conservatives want to conserve? Based on current events it’s certainly not our established government organization, or our free news media, or our traditional international relations, or respect for our legal system. And why do we cling to the dichotomy of the two-party system anyway?
It does seem that we are clinging to old fashioned and ill-fitting dichotomous thinking. Democrats vs. Republicans, Liberals vs. conservatives, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, males vs. females. All imposed like square pegs being inserted into the round holes of the truth of who we really are. Of course the game is confusing, with all sides playing a huge monopoly game with principles that once worked. Sometimes the requests I receive for money to help in the political game feel like leaning against the closed door after the horses have left the barn. I feel like we old fogies are in denial about the real interactive complexities of our world. And maybe there’s no limit on how young a fogey can be.
It seems to me we need some really creative thinking to tear apart the ways that once worked and to create new adjustments to the real complexities. Come to think of it, that’s the first general step in creativity – to unravel the old patterns and put them together in new ways. Hmm. Maybe that’s what we’re living through right now. Trashing the old designs to make way for the new. Maybe being confused is just where we need to be.
But there’s nothing that says the process won’t hurt. And I certainly don’t want it to go on without trying to reduce the pain as the axe falls. And I sure hope we don’t get stuck too long in the hopeless, cruel, and violent effort to reimpose the way things never were, and probably never should have been, in the first place.
monagustafsonaffinito 