Back in 1999, I wrote a book called Eating Mythos Soup: poemstories for Laura. It contains a short piece that expresses how I feel about words, which I believe says it all. Here it is:

I am obsessed by the sounds of words. I like Old English comical words like mugwort, or marshmallow. I like hushed words spoken in whispers, like neath and ghoul. I like common ordinary words like horn and jump and dog.

I feel words nestled in my mouth, tucked into my cheeks. I smell them and taste them and lick every last drop from the corners of my lips. Then I let them roll and drip like sweet spiced oil off my tongue.

Words like nut have a short sharp crunchy feel as I say them; and when I say honey I can feel the goldenbrown goo thick at the back of my throat. Or consider the word crazy: the bee-tickled Z sound juxtaposed with the terrified EE sound of the y, the harsh C next to the soft liquid R; these are contradictions and make you doubt the location of your mind.

I am enveloped in the sweet glut of words. I jump into them as if they are piles of autumn leaves. I roll around and listen to them crinkle and crisp under my broad soft hips. Or I dive into them as if they were the gooiest darkest mud in the Congo Basin; I let them stop up my ears and my nose and I snort and sneeze and squelch and rub them in my armpits. I hang them on my body like jewels, and I spray them on my skin like perfume. I ornament an decorate and design myself with words.

And I feed myself with words. I suck them in while hot and feel them burn all the way down, and I even crave cold leftover words because they too can hit that blank lonely spot and make the soothing Aahh begin.

Excerpt from Eating Mythos Soup: poemstories for Laura, ©2000, Kim Pearson

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A spirited conversation occurred on Thanksgiving this year, between me, my daughter, son-in-law, and step-granddaughter, when my grandson, age 2 ½, came running into the room, sporting a diaper full of poop. “PU!” exclaimed everyone. (Except my grandson, who is too young to care.)

And that started us off on the question of where did the exclamation PU come from? It’s an interesting question, but it turns out that no one really knows. (Linguists actually spend their professional time arguing about this question.)

First off, no one knows how it’s even spelled. Is it pew? or P.U.? And if it’s P.U., what do the P and U stand for? Or is it an abbreviation of a longer word?

Oh, how useful is the magic box! What did we do before the Internet and we had to simply wonder about these fascinating questions?

Still the internet wasn’t that helpful on this one. We found out that some linguists think PU is a shortened term for puteo, Latin for “to stink or smell bad.” Other linguists think its root is the Indo-European word “pu” meaning to rot or decay.

And that’s as much as I could find out. So far. Now I will go spend more of my professional time trying to discover the answer to this earth-shaking question.

In a later post I might explore OK . . .

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Last Friday was my little brother’s birthday. Neither he nor I are little any longer. But in my memory he still is.

During the summer nights when he was 6 and I was 13, my brother Mike and I often camped outside in our backyard. With the hulk of our house nearby, warm in our sleeping bags, we lay on our backs with our eyes on the zillions of stars above. Soothed by the songs of frogs and the warm drowsy chuckles of the hens that were our father’s current project, we contemplated the vast summer sky and wondered about things.

We talked about ordinary stuff like what kind of bike was the best, and going fishing with Dad, and how to get out of eating the disgusting vegetables that Mom put on the dinner table. But our best conversations centered on the stars glittering above us. Who was up there, really? Did they look like us, or like the goggle-eyed monsters on TV? If they came to earth, could we talk to them? Could we travel that far and meet them?

Mike loved me to tell stories about these faraway planets. He admired my storytelling abilities, and his appreciation inspired me to flights of imagination that wandered from the sublime to the ridiculous. One of his favorite sagas was the series of stories I told him the year our grand¬father died. The story had a startling beginning. “Grandpa’s not really dead,” I said. “Nobody really dies. They just go live on a different planet.”

Grandpa’s planet was right at the far tip of the Big Dipper. Grandpa chose that planet, I said, because it was in trouble and needed help. It was over¬run by creatures from the planet Wayne. (Wayne was the name of the neighborhood bully, a boy Mike hated.) The Waynians were blue-skinned and had only one eye, which they could hold in their hands like a marble. They used this eye as a spy device to see into people’s minds, and as a weapon that shot a gluey substance that clogged up your nose and ears and mouth.

Grandpa had many adventures fighting against the Waynians, until he finally sent the Waynians packing by pouring warm fish guts into their eyes. The fish guts dissolved the glue and rendered the Waynians helpless.

The native inhabitants of the planet were so grateful that they named the planet after Grandpa, whose name was Myron. So now this planet at the far tip of the Big Dipper is known as the planet Myron.

I can still feel my little brother shaking with chuckles as Grandpa saved the planet Myron from the Waynians. By the light of the remembered moon I see Mike’s eyes shining with mischief and grace, a combination uniquely his own which even today peeks from his middle-aged eyes.

excerpt from Making History: how to remember, record, interpret and share the events of your life. ©2007, Kim Pearson

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