Tag Archives: aluminum

Anchor

dictionary with letter A

Anchor: (n) a heavy object attached to a rope or chain and used to moor a vessel to the bottom.

It was made of aluminum, about twelve feet long, with three wooden, bench seats inside, one of the perches broken.

It was my dad’s boat.

It more resembled a canoe with a thyroid problem.

But whenever my dad launched his vessel onto the great and mighty waters of Hoover Lake, he suddenly transformed into some sort of John Paul Jones, which to me as a boy, appeared as a nautical monster.

He began using the lingo of the sea and was perpetually angry with his crew–embodied solely in myself.

He explained that the best way to fish was to find a quiet, deep lagoon and drop your anchor so your boat wouldn’t move, and you would be present with your bait, to lure in the schools of fish. (Often we often must have arrived during some sort of fish holiday–because the schools were usually out.)

Nevertheless, he yelled at me to drop anchor, which was a forty pound cube of cement block, which he had put together by pouring it into a plastic bucket and then destroying the bucket to free the cement once it had hardened. Attached to this heavy clump was a rope.

Now, you must realize–we only had twenty-five feet of rope on our anchor–which is fine is you happen to be perched in twenty-three feet of water. But as I lifted the huge mass over the side of the boat and dropped it into the water, I was never sure if it actually hit the bottom.

So after an hour or so, my dad would look up from his fishing pole, where he had frozen his eyes intently, and realize that we had floated far from our desired spot.

This initiated a whole new tirade of “captain-to-deck-swab” complaints. I tried to defend myself by explaining that we did not have enough rope to reach the bottom of the lake, but he never seemed to quite comprehend that if the anchor doesn’t land on the bottom, it really doesn’t keep you in place.

What great symbolism.

After all, if our anchor is floating along with society’s ideas and standards instead of landing firmly on solid ground, we, too, tend to drift from our preferred placement.

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Aluminum

dictionary with letter A

Aluminum: (n) the chemical element of atomic number 13, a light silvery-gray metal, the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, obtained mainly from bauxite

It is amazing how words, ideas and concepts are all related to our personal experience rather than the reality of what they may be.

For after all, hearing the word aluminum, I might think of cans of soda, which I certainly have enjoyed over the years.

I might conjure an image of aluminum siding, which permeated the thinking of my townfolk growing up, as everyone deliberated whether it was a good alternative to the peeling paint on their wooden homes or the crumbling mortar on their brick ones.

But for me the word “aluminum” has an entirely different representation.

When I was a kid I lived in a household where various plans were hatched to attempt to make extra money or projects were pursued which were deemed worthy of our attention because they were new and innovative.

For instance, my dad bought a piece of multi-colored plastic which he was convinced could be placed over our television set to give the illusion of color TV without having to buy one of those more expensive brands. But of course, all it did was make the picture appear like fruit-striped gum.

Likewise, somewhere along the line my dad devised a plan to build a storehouse for boats to be held during the winter months in Ohio, when things were not sea-worthy. (Or since Ohio is landlocked, shall we say “lake-worthy?”)

This was an investment. And I remember that the main part of the investment involved purchasing huge sheets of corrugated aluminum to place on the building to protect it from the elements.

Well, here’s what happened. My dad laid the foundation for the warehouse, put up the boards for the framing and ran out of money before all of the aluminum could be attached. Even though he did put a couple of ships into the lean-to, it was never completed, and piles of the aluminum material were stacked nearby. They seemed to stay there forever.

Matter of fact, they remained long enough to become the home for all sorts of vermin: spiders, rats, possum, raccoons–any number of less-than-fortunate creatures from the animal kingdom did their wintering underneath the pile of my dad’s ignored aluminum.

So to this day, I cannot hear the word “aluminum” without a chill traveling down my spine … as I wonder what’s going to crawl out and bite me.