For some reason, big storms in the Pacific Northwest seem to happen on holidays. There was the Easter windstorm that happened sometime in the nineties. I was in the middle of cooking Easter dinner for company when the power went out. Bill and his pal, Alan, had gone to an auction and bought a wooden boat that had been damaged the previous winter when a snow-covered boathouse collapsed. They were rehabbing it in the friend’s side yard when the electricity went bye-bye. I called the friend’s house where his wife informed Bill, who was upside down, hanging by his ankles, working on the boat, about what had happened. He famously replied, “I don’t have any electricity in my pocket.”
In a state of absolute fury, I marched out to the backyard, grabbed our gas grill and fired it up and cooked the whole damned meal on that, including heating the water to wash the dishes afterwards. I think abject terror kept that grill running, because the rusted-out hulk never fired up again.
But back to storms. There’s the Columbus Day storm of 1962, the Thanksgiving Day Storm of 1983, the Inauguration Day Storm of 1993, and the Hanukkah Storm of 2006. That shut down power lines for close to a week. Everyone went to Bellevue Square Mall to charge their devices because the mall was the only place with power. The next year I asked for a generator for my birthday and got one. Then there was a mid-December, no-holiday snowstorm, that meant our pre-Christmas party ended up being held on New Year’s Eve. The year after that I asked for a snowplow for my birthday and got one of those, too.
This week we had a no-holiday windstorm. The power went out at 6 PM on Tuesday. Two days in it’s still out and likely to remain so for some time. Fortunately, we had zero damage, and that vintage generator from 2006 is out there plugging away—keeping us warm, the lights on, and the food in the fridge still cold. We’re now able to access the internet by using our cell phone hotspots, so we don’t have to go to the mall, we’re not out of business, and I’m still working.
Last night, when I called it quits on doing the copy-editing edit on The Girl From Devil’s Lake, the TV was off so I did something I’ve done far too seldom the last few years—I opened someone else’s book—a Louise Penny. Turns out it’s not The Grey Wolf, her most recent, but a couple of books earlier, A Trick of Light.
And as soon as I started reading, something hit me. Louise Penny writes her stories in sentence fragments. With wild abandon. And it works. It keeps things moving. In a way you don’t anticipate. And all those pieces of sentences. Flow along. Introducing complex characters. And revealing their motivations. But it’s foreign territory. For me.
As a survivor of Mrs. Medigovich’s English class my senior year at Bisbee High School, I’m compelled to write. In complete sentences. Ones that have both subjects and predicates. Remember those? And don’t even bother mentioning Participles and Gerunds! Generation Z has never heard of them, and neither have their teachers. And if there happen to be two independent clauses in any given sentence. They have to be separated by a comma and a conjunction. (Someone sent me an email this week where there were dashes where there should have been commas! I was appalled. And offended. If you’re an English Major, commas are almost sacred—and that goes for the Oxford comma by the way. That’s the one that comes at the end of a series of more than two items. Like this, this, and this! For example!
PS. In case you’re wondering, here’s the deal with Gerunds and Participles. Gerunds are words ending in ING that are used as nouns. Walking is good for you. Sleeping is too. In these instances both WALKING and SLEEPING are Gerunds. Participles are ING words used as an adjective or as an adverb modifying an adjective. She was a living and breathing walking monster! In this case WALKING is a participle—an adjective modifying the noun MONSTER. LIVING and BREATHING are both Gerunds modifying the adjective WALKING. Got it?
Very early in our courtship, Bill and I attended a play at the Seattle Rep where the sweet young wife of a curmudgeonly English professor goes off on a so-called whale-watching expedition. By the way WATCHING is a participle in this instance because it’s an ING word modifying the noun EXPEDITION! But I digress. Back to the play. The professor finally explodes in anger and shouts: ____ (Insert four letter bad word here starting with an F.) ____ the whales! Save the Gerund!
Only three people in the audience laughed at that line, and Bill and I were two of them. That’s probably one of the reasons we’re still married thirty-nine years later. We both got that joke.
And now, having shown you in black and white why my grandson calls me his Grammar Grandma, I’m going to curl up. Next to our gas-log fireplace. And read a story. That will continue to be told. In one sentence fragment after another. And I intend to enjoy. Every minute of it.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!
PS. Although we had a generator, hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly without electricity on Tuesday night and stayed that way for days. When I went to bed on Saturday evening there were still 60,000 customers in the Seattle area that were without power. At 4:15 this morning, while we were snug in our bed, someone was out there working in the cold and the rain. That’s when our power came back on and the generator shut off. All of which means I have one more thing to say: THE MOST IMPORTANT LINEMEN IN THE COUNTRY DO NOT PLAY FOOTBALL FOR THE NFL! And I thank them all for their hard work!