Family, Orderliness, and ... Punctuation

 

Family:

It’s six in the morning, I’ve been up since 4:50, waking to the sound of thunder and rain. I’m housesitting at my daughter’s, keeping an eye on a potentially leaky basement after the rain floods here a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve spent some of my time here watching tennis, but also—cleaning and organizing. You may not agree with me, but I think it’s a mother’s prerogative to clean her child’s house when house sitting. I haven’t thrown away anything, or snooped, just tidied up and organized a bit. My daughter has a busy life and is a foodie with a small kitchen and a vast array of cooking oils and vinegars stored haphazardly on two shelves. So I organized the smaller bottles into containers, cleaned the shelves, and now it looks even tidier than my own very small collection at home.

I returned home on the weekend to attend our annual family picnic with about sixty people spanning four generations. I know the names of my cousins’ kids, but when you get down to the next generation, the best way to find out who they are is to ask them who their parents are. My dad comes from a big family so the age range is large, with my youngest cousin being older than one of his uncles (I think. I could be wrong).

At the picnic, I was heartened to have my faith in the younger generation restored. One of my cousin’s three kids (in their teens and twenties) each took the time to tell me a little about their lives, the teen boy even going to fetch his phone (not attached to him) and show me pictures of his recent fishing trip. I was struck by how genuinely interested they were in talking to the “old fogeys”, when it’s more common for that generation (Z? Alpha? Who knows anymore?) to perform quick, dutiful greetings before hurrying back to their phones or friends.

Grammar and Punctuation:

One of my early morning habits is, of course, writing in my journal. I read somewhere recently about the benefits of writing by hand—something I’d already known was good for the creative process, but now I’ve learned it is also good for cognitive health. But what I’ve noticed is that, apart from my handwriting becoming a scrawl, my grammar and punctuation have slid from the high standards I learned in school and that were drilled into us. I blame quick texting and emails for this.

But now I’m on a mission to return to the standards I learned in high school. I used to love commas and their correct, careful placement in sentences. I loved them so much that maybe I overdid them. Once, a while ago, one of my writing teachers said to me, “Hey, Pearl. Why don’t you try omitting some commas, just for fun?” And so began my slide into comma omission, lack of punctuation, and long rambling sentences.

But I’m here to say—bring back the comma, and while we’re at it, the semicolon too. The latter is an elegant pause and often a much needed one; it affords the breath many are unwilling to take.  Are you with me? Commas for everyone; semicolons for a few.