Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: my dyslexic ex

  • a man who cooks

    A man who loves to cook but cannot bake is so good for a girl’s convenience and ego. Years ago I lived with a guy who thought “hundreds of thousands” were called “thousands of millions” and that croissants were a cross bread. He wasn’t wrong but his dyslexia was a continuing delight and I always had pen and paper beside the phone. Once toward Christmas we had a craving for custard and he opened the pantry sadly to show me, “there isn’t any.” When I whipped up a slow custard on the stove top using an actual egg and pan of actual milk he was so wonderfully astonished. It made me feel I had alchemical superpowers: the power to make custard without custard powder. Non custard powder custard power. I rocked!

    Tonight I showed another man how you can tell your egg whites are beaten. He was lying on the bed reading and his gasp when I held the bowl upside down over his head was so terribly gratifying. Next week: the creation of a delicious pudding using nothing more than a bowl of scrambled egg mix and loaf of stale dry bread.

     

  • never the swain

    Two swains drifting like white roses on the dark canal. My Berliner swain calls them swains and I never correct him. Similarly I refrained for reasons of selfish enjoyment from pointing out to an earlier, South Australian swain, who though a native speaker was heartily dyslexic (he called our chimney ‘the chumley’), that the swans’ babies are commonly called ‘cygnets’. ‘Look Oel. A mummy and a daddy swan. And all the little swanlings.’

  • Germaniac

    Favourite German-English idiomcy of the week: a friend confesses to ‘bunch-watching.’ That’s when you borrow an entire season of some tv show on dvd and watch the lot.

    Favourite personal neologism of the night: idiomcy. I didn’t have the right word (it’s not exactly ‘mistranslation’) and didn’t want to insult my friend’s English. As I typed, out it came.

    I guess his invention can be applied in all sorts of ways. Bunch-drinking. Bingey-jumping. The Brady Binge, a story of blended families.

    H2O HoL angled orange train

  • smoosh-smoosh

    smoosh-smoosh

    A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys to move… so my typing is, he has said, like “a herd of gazelle.” Afterwards he apologized, in faulty idiom. “I didn’t mean to smoosh-smoosh you.” “Ah it’s ok. You can shush-shush me. I know I get overexcited, writing.”

    H2O HoL brecht bookshop

  • the little swanlings

    On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”

     

  • a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last

    a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last

    I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? I never correct my friend because every time I hear “this cost me almost fifty bugs” it makes me so happy.

    H2O HoL winterbound apfelherz

  • you sneak up, & I’ll sneak

    you sneak up, & I’ll sneak

    Years before I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne with my then partner. We towed behind us the tower of terror: all of our possessions lashed to a homemade trailer. His possessions were mostly tools and mine were mostly books.

    In a seaside town we stopped with his best friend and her husband. They had a four-year-old boy and he and I fell in love. The grown-ups strolled on ahead down the wickety dunes, talking and idly watching the seagulls wheel overhead, and the two of us scampered and bolted, climbed under and hid. We found things in the sand which have no name. We found soft glass and seagrapes, rusted and tasting salty.

    We burst back onto the roadside with its sparse traffic, three heads disappearing far out in front. In a rush of inspiration he turned to me: “I know! How about, you sneak up on your daddy, and I’ll sneak up on my daddy!”

    I remember the feeling of protective love that washed me in that weird warm moment. I was so frightened of seeing the hope and ambition, the trickery, fade from his eyes and their expression subdue and dim. I was frightened he might suddenly realize: Ach no! You’re one of Them! But we did it. He sneaked up on his daddy. And I sneaked up on mine. Ambush!