sense and insensibility
by cynthia drew

I hate to say it, but I’ve got a burr under my saddle—clichés. I can’t live with them and rumor has it that we, the people, can’t live without them. Clichés rub me the wrong way. Welcome to my world—a work in progress bathed in a carnival atmosphere.

Here’s where I’m coming from, and correct me if I’m wrong: I may be blonde but I’m not dumb as a box of rocks. On the other hand, I may not be the smartest cookie in the jar. Now I don’t know, but I’ve been told I’m big as life, thin as a rail and that my legs go all the way up.

When I turn on a weather report in the early-morning hours my husband, he of saturnine character and titanic strength, the heart and soul of our team and a wily veteran of clichés, as good a player as there is in that league, will rock back on his heels and announce with reckless abandon and a platonic smile: “Weather or not.”

And in a group of co-workers gathered in the rain-drenched, storm-tossed predawn darkness last September, the fog thick as pea soup, to comb through rubble that lay squandered in the wake of the wrath of Hurricane Ivan, one of our number was quoted as saying, “Live and learn.”

It was a dark and stormy night —nary a Kodak moment in sight —and since telephone lines were down we couldn’t reach out and touch someone. This was the real deal.

Yet rain failed to dampen thedownpour that followed. Someone else mumbled, “We should have known. It was only a matter of time.” A double whammy.
Our boss, known to look out for number one, whispered, “Well, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

“What goes around comes around,” someone else chimed in.
And finally, “Nobody ever said life was fair.”

That really brought it home. Throw another blanket on the fire, folks, this swap meet isn’t over ‘til it’s over.

Allow me to break the game wide open. While news anchors, always making it look easy, sign off at night after delivering “News you can use,” sports announcers know what it takes to win at clichés, and with linebacker mentality they get stronger as the game goes on. After all, with a lower center of gravity than most they can, with blinding speed, really turn it on: “He came to play,” “They need to put points on the board,” and that old chestnut (which is itself an old chestnut) “You can’t say enough about him.”
But the real heroine of this vast, sprawling epic is my searingly honest, darkly comic aunt, a vibrantly-alive sixtysomething, whose cocktail of penetrating insights, achingly beautiful malapropisms and mixed metaphors often become laugh-out-loud fare. She waits with “abated breath” for something to happen and frequently falls for a shaggy-dog story “hook, line and stinker.” And while I permit her to tell me, “You’ve buttered your bread, now lie in it,” I deny her opinion that I “don’t know my elbow from Shinola.”

Entire schools of cliché – media, sports, finance or criticism – exist to abuse the mother tongue, but cliché dismay can be an emotional roller-coaster of paralysis by analysis, rendering us speechless for fear of using clichés. The crux of the problem: what, anymore, isn’t a cliché? After all, there’s nothing new under the sun. History repeats itself over and over. No harm, no foul.
We should all have a go-to guy who came to play on game day. And when we see a window of opportunity it invariably opens onto a cloudless sky beyond manicured lawns of a sun-drenched, tree-lined leafy suburb. While we struggle to make sense of someone’s draconian bottom line or their blueprint for growth, we tolerate hidden agendas, colossal impertinences and cynical indifference, wait for our ship to come in and yearn for halcyon days. And all the while, we avoid like the plague opening Pandora’s Box of worms or crossing the Rubicon. Because that’s what it’s all about.

And so I bid farewell, reminding you that at the end of the day I’m okay, you’re okay, and it’s all good. I’m just telling it like it is – and saying it with flowers.

 

Cynthia Drew lives in Weaverville. Her stories have recently appeared in Taj Mahal Review and Perigee. I took second place in Rapid River’s recent Short Story Contest.