When my friend Cheryl’s grandson came for a visit, she told us, if weather permitted, she and her husband were taking him and his friend out that afternoon on their boat. The next day, I texted to ask if they got to go fishing the day before. “We did go out on the boat,” she said. “Maybe something I said sounded like the word fishing?”
Something happened between Cheryl’s mouth and my ears. I was stunned to realize I had gotten it wrong. Cheryl said boat, but I heard fishing. It happened like this.
We live in Delaware. One of our daughters lives in south Louisiana. Every time we visit them, weather permitting, our son-in-law Joe takes my husband out on his boat to go fishing. Joe owns a boat. His son owns a boat. They both go fishing every chance they get.
Just this morning our daughter sent a photo by text (this one) of sunrise over the water. Her message with the photo was “Out early this AM.” I knew from the photo, since it was a water shot, that they were in the boat going fishing. It never occurred to me that they might just go out in the boat. Sure enough, around noon, she sent another photo holding her catch. She was sunburned and smiling.
How can one word be said and another image come to mind? I thought back about a test one of my children brought home from school in the early grades. Each line had a series of pictures following a letter of the alphabet. Students were to circle the drawing of the word in the series that started with the letter. I can’t remember now which child it was, but they missed one answer.
"What about this one?" I asked about the line they got marked wrong. Which of these pictures start with the letter V?”
“None of ‘em.”
“What about this one?” I asked, pointing to the violin. “Violin starts with V.”
“Oh, that’s not a violin. That’s a fiddle.”
7/13/2020 Facebook post, Molly Davis Stadalis
Kommentare