Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

I remember the accident as if it was yesterday.
I had been living in Washington, D.C. for three years. That particular morning, a Saturday, I was running late for work. It was a gray, wet morning at the edge of Winter. Heavy rain, like molten white gold, fell from an aluminum sky as I blazed along at 80 mph. A gray car merged onto the roadway from the right, then proceeded to move into my lane without signaling. The car was moving so slowly it looked like it was moving backwards. I pressed the brakes hard, pumping steadily with increasing pressure, my right hand tight on the gearshift ready to down shift. Realizing collision was inevitable, I glanced at the speedometer: 60. The impact sent my little car spinning towards the concrete divider separating west-bound traffic from east. The world seemed upside down. I remember thinking, I’m going to die and I never got to be friends with my father. I glanced up at the sky, oddly unafraid, and I swear I saw the hand of God reach down and stop…

The mystery surrounding bathrooms have always been, well, a mystery to me.
When we were kids, our mother had a friend who had a daughter who was around the same age as my younger brother and me. When they came over, the three of us kids would head off to our bedroom to play. One day in the middle of playing my brother said he had to go to the bathroom, so Michelle and I went with him. He sat on the toilet and Michelle and I perched on the edge of the tub. Vernon cracked a joke and Michelle leapt to her feet and laughing nudged his shoulder—a bit too hard. My brother who was, at the time, extremely thin, fell bottom down into the toilet. Unable to free him, we called for our mothers. Once they had extricated him, Michelle’s mother looked at Michelle and asked her what she had been doing in the bathroom anyway.
“We were playing,” I explained reasonably, “and Vernon had to go to the bathroom, so we came with him.” I remember Michelle’s mother repeating she shouldn’t have been in the bath…

Even now, after all is said and done, after thirteen years together, after he is gone, I find it hard to explain Toby and me.
December 10, 2005. Princeton, New Jersey: The first time ever I saw his face.
There was snow on the ground. The air was frigid and dense with the hope of finding “the one,” and at the same time like a vacuum of held breath. Above the chaos, a leaden sky sagged, gray and heavy with inarticulate hope.
“Is that Toby?” I asked a woman walking by. “It is,” she said. He was as handsome as he was in his pictures online; I leaned down, breathless, and he, unexpectedly, jumped into my arms, landing on my chest. Our hearts collided, seemed to stop for a moment and continued to beat in synchrony; his next exhaled breath matched mine exactly. The next breath, drawn in surprise, also in synch.
We were Toby’s fourth home in less than two years. I spoke to his original owner once, just briefly. He explained that Toby had behavioral problems, which had prompted him to give Toby …

My father taught me the value of silence. It was from him that I learned it takes more strength to hold your tongue than to loose it. Daddy was always the quiet one in our house. My mother’s voice was the dominant, reasoning soundtrack. My brothers’ voices were like murmurs on the wind .I was the noisy, unruly, talkative one. I was “like a clapper bell from hell,” my quiet father insisted.
I spent my adolescence resenting my father’s silence, my twenties and thirties trying to understand it, only to discover in my forties that daddy wasn’t intentionally silent: he only spoke the words that needed to be spoken. By the time I entered my 50s, he ended nearly every phone call with “I love you.” He used his words sparingly, saying only what needed to be said. If he told me over and over that he loved me it was because he knew I needed to hear he loved me.
For me, noisy kid that I was, my father’s silence was particularly jarring when set against my mother’s loquaciousness. Her words like foo…

As I mentioned in Ode to Words (Part 1): One Line Wednesday, I recently attended a workshop on racial and gender equity. While there, and as part of the workshop, I was exposed to words that were mostly unfamiliar to me:
systemic oppression…equity-focused…gender justice lens…power imbalances…patriarchy…unpacking white privilege…micro aggressions…gender policing…monosexism…tokenism…White Fragility…intersectionality…
As I listened, perplexed, and watched others around me nodding and murmuring understanding, I felt oddly…isolated.
Have you ever played that game with yourself where you repeat a common, known, word over-and-over until it loses all meaning, all sense? Words are funny things, aren’t they? They can be powerful and meaningful—listen to any Barack Obama speech—or absurd—read any of DonaldTrump’s tweets, or heck listen to him speak extemporaneously.
systemic oppression…equity-focused…gender justice lens…power imbalances…patriarchy…unpacking white privilege…micro aggressions…gender…