Triciaisms

It would have been Tricia’s 49th birthday today, if cancer had not brought a premature end to her life back in January.*

My thoughts are still of Tricia for several minutes of every hour and several hours of every day. And not just of her dynamic physical presence — her flashing eyes and long legs and lust for life — but of her fast and irreverent wit, and her wonderful way with words.

Often her humor was dark. She would joke even about her own impending death. She knew her cancer was terminal, and that I had been married twice before, so my third marriage was going to be ended by cancer just as my second marriage had been. One day as our conversation touched on this gloomy topic, Tricia suddenly exclaimed: “You’re going through wives like other men go through socks!” And liberated us to dissolve in laughter.

Sometimes she would poke me in the ribs, point out a random grouchy-looking and clearly unsuitable woman in the supermarket, and whisper, “There’s your No. 4!” Embarrassingly outrageous; shockingly funny.

It was Tricia, with her great big generous heart, who rescued the abused puppy now called Lottie from the vicious woman in Yorkshire who had almost starved it to death, but in that post I only alluded to her. In another post (this one) I directly quoted and attributed an acid remark of Tricia’s about name-dropping (“Status is not like pubic lice: You don’t pick it up simply through intimate contact with someone who has it!”).

I also gave explicit credit to Tricia for the favor of putting me on the track of the cliché ’twas ever thus, back in 2013, though I didn’t mention that she contributed substantively to the development of the resultant post (if I remember correctly, the point that Dick Swiveller would be an odd role model for a politician was hers), and she came up with the (deniably) suggestive title.

I took a special interest in a structurally interesting class of Tricia’s remarks that I privately called “Triciaisms.” They involve the use of a single word or phrase twice in a row, the second occurrence having a subtly different impact. (The form isn’t original with her, of course: I’ve seen a postcard that says “Nothing changes, if nothing changes!”)

Once, for example, as she was trying to explain why a quarrel over some minor thing assumed importance to her precisely because the relationship in which it was embedded was so important, she said: “It wouldn’t matter, if it didn’t matter!”

In the clearest cases of Triciaisms, one occurrence of the repeated phrase has to be read as metaphorical and the other not. Reading both literally yields a mere tautology, but under the Triciaism reading a difference emerges. One afternoon she mowed the lumpy lawn of a little garden that we were supposed to look after as a condition of our lease. Getting it smooth and even was not easy. Tricia said when I got home: “I cut the grass. I think it’ll do. It’s not a cricket pitch, but then, it’s not a cricket pitch.”

However, the funniest thing I recall her saying was not a Triciaism in this narrow sense. It was an Old Testament allusion. Going down the path from our building to the street one day, Tricia was following the occupant of the apartment upstairs — a slim, attractive woman in her 50s who looks (we both agreed) extremely good in her tight-fitting jeans. Tricia was quietly admiring the way those jeans were filled out. Then she suddenly pulled herself up short: Watching a woman’s rear that way would be called ogling if a man did it.

She told me later, “I suddenly thought, wait a minute, look at me! I’m coveting my neighbor’s ass!”

*I’m writing this for Friday, June 3; Lingua Franca posts actually get datestamped before midnight the previous night, for boring software reasons. The photo is by Jim Donaldson.