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Bedroom Grammar |
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by Craig Perez
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6:00 |
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Where is Jane sleeping?
Jane is sleeping in her bedroom.
Is Jane sleeping in her bedroom?
What is Jane doing in her bedroom?
Who is sleeping in her bedroom?
Jane isn’t sleeping in her bedroom.
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Jane and I live at 55 Scarlet Road in Durham. Durham is in Windham County. Windham County is in Connecticut. When we first moved in, Jane wanted to give all our smiling-bedroom-eye photographs to the neighbors and I knew we were home.
*
"This room is a great foundation for experimentation in that area," Jane said. "Even a vase of something like winterberries, willow, or maple branches (if we can find them locally) would add great texture and color contrast with the wall."
"This room (to me) is about color, but also about shape," I said. "Most notably the blocky kind (in a good way). One great thing about such striking colors is that at night when the lights are dim they take on a completely different character."
"Good point about it being dark when we sleep," Jane said. "I think my heart rate would be racing from all the color and I would then be unable to sleep. But that's me, and I'm the I-can-only-sleep-in-white-sheets-and-a-peaceful-environment type."
"True, not all could live here," I said. "But I love the commitment, and the theatrical, semi-surrealist result."
*
‘Jane is in the bath.’
This sense of the word ‘in’ is less fundamental because although the person is located within the bath there is no complete containment because part of Jane would be considered to be outside the bath.
‘Jane has a cigarette in her mouth.’
In this example the cigarette is again not contained within Jane’s mouth. We would not expect her to open her mouth to reveal a cigarette. The cigarette is mostly outside the mouth, with only a small part inside.
‘Jane is in a panic.’
In this case panic is a very abstract state (it can be considered to be part biological, part emotional), and Jane is ‘in’ a panic because she is contained within the state of panic, which begins and ends.
*
One day, Jane tried to teach a starling grammar. After a month, they had a little show. She explained how I had to put the trained starling’s grammar skills into perspective. In this case she was using grammar as if it was a tool. Tools are commonly considered to be in your hands when they are being used, and therefore touching a part of you, and with you in the sense of physical proximity: hard and gratuit. I took Jane to the kitchen table for a linking verbs lesson. Later, we went to Target to buy her a tiara and a douvet cover for our king sized bed. You might wonder why two small-to-average-sized grown-ups need such a huge bed in their tiny bedroom. What can I say, we're large in spirit.
*
“Just curious about the silhouettes,” Jane says. “How were they done? Is the white portion die-cut and then placed on top of squares of blue that are panted on the wall? Or are the blue silhouettes painted directly on a white background? It's playing tricks on my eyes...but why not really feature it? Large scale ornate white lacquer frame, and the two images matted underneath a deep blue matte? It will give the silhouettes much more presence in the room. When the rest of the room is this extreme, I think you only need the tiniest of deviation to make it all purposeful, and I think the organic nature of the silhouettes provides it. And the shapes of the lamp ‘talk’ to the silhouettes, etc.”
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Jane likes to sleep with an open bedroom window, even if Sadey likes to play with her black and white squeaky ball. Abby likes to run out of the bedroom and lick out Penny and Tippy's blue bowls. When Tippy was a puppy, he liked to crawl under the coffee table and hide. Jane pretends to sleep when Daisy suddenly pounces at her feet. Aroused, a brown bat makes figure eights in the bedroom. Jane closes the closet door and makes the hall door wide open. The bat has a ten inch wing span and Jane struggles to sail-wall the bat with her body. Around 5 am, the bat finally leaves the bedroom. Jane says, “I’m sooooo hungry.” There was much oversleeping and latenesses later.
*
Jane is teaching herself Italian. “One of these has key sections including survival phrases, fun activities, conversations and speech practice against the voice of a native speaker. There are several practice dialogues based on commonplace situations – in the bank, the hotel, the taxi and so on – with some priceless examples that all of us wished we’d known at some point (‘I’ve locked the key in the bedroom’). It’s an all-round good package.”
She is trying to convince me to learn. She says, “If you’ve never tried it before, the initial approach can be a bit daunting, but with a little practice it’ll soon come to make sense if you dive into hard grammar basics. There's plenty of short films to keep you busy, and while it's not movie quality, it's fine for education purposes. For a complete beginner, it may be difficult to motivate oneself initially; there is no gentle introduction to the basics. The ‘beginner’ sections do go straight in the deep end, but by taking it slow to begin with, the material is self explanatory.”
*
Last night, for 40 exhausting minutes, I battled the five-point whitetail deer with my bare hands in the bedroom. It crashed through the bedroom window on Friday.
“Just last week,” Jane said. “My grandmother told me about a deer ‘breaking in,’ if you will, to her bank. Apparently, the deer saw its reflection in the glass, thought it was a mate, and attempted to ‘flirt’ with it. As you can imagine, the buck bolted through the glass and slid across the polished bank lobby floor. The scared deer attempted to escape, yet failed, causing everyone to hide behind desks and furniture. The buck was finally captured in the president’s office and left alone until it could be tranquilized. Luckily, the incident didn’t cause any serious injuries.”
“My response differed greatly than that of the small town bank,” I said.
Jane said: “you have clearly cooked deer hunting down to its essence: a warm fire, soft chair, good wine, lie-swapping. Yes, it requires an obligatory stint in a freezing deer stand up in a tree, sleet and freezing rain slapping your face, but that only makes the fire, chair, wine, and lie-swapping even more delicious. The deer is entirely secondary.”
Craig Perez Craig Santos Perez is the author of 3 chapbooks: blue outline (Achiote Press, 2006), constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, forthcoming 2007), and all with ocean views (Overhere Press, forthcoming in 2007). His poetry, reviews, and translations have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Sentence, Traffic, Tinfish, Jacket, Rain Taxi, Calque, Tea Party, and Watchword, among others. He blogs at blindelephant.blogspot.com.
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