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Anomaly

dictionary with letter A

Anomaly: (n) something that deviates from the normal, standard or expected

I liked music.

At eighteen years of age, I’m not so sure that I was totally devoted to a career in the field or whether there was a bit of laziness tied into the equation, because playing piano sounded easier than punching a time-clock. (After all, we get ourselves in the most trouble when we try to purify our motives instead of accepting them a trifle sullied.)

One afternoon during that eighteenth year, I took my girlfriend, who was soon to become my wife, into a back room of a loan company owned by my parents and sat down at a piano which had been given to our family, but because we had no room in our house, ended up stuck in the back corner of this lending institution.

I had never written a song before.

As a teenager, I sang in choir, a quartet and for nursing homes, pretending like it was a big gig at Madison Square Garden.

Yet on this day, I suddenly got this urge to compose. It was not stimulated by a professor at a college asking for an assignment, nor was it motivated by my ancestors, wishing that I would abandon all normal courses of occupation and pursue a musical path.

It was truly an anomaly.

  • It was contrary to what everybody wanted me to do.
  • It was an open, seething contradiction to my cultural training.
  • I sat down at that piano, and in the course of the next ninety-four minutes, wrote two original songs. I didn’t know if they were good and certainly was not confident they were great.

But something came out of me that wasn’t a conditioned response or a well-studied answer for a final exam.

It was mine.

Whether it was good or bland, it came from me. It excited me. It encouraged me to muster the perseverance to survive the critique of my society and even overcome my own fits of lethargy to pursue it.

It still excites me today.

Hundreds of songs later, I still feel as thrilled when pen goes to paper, words appear and musical notes cuddle up next to them.

No one in my family ever took the course of action which I chased, beginning with that afternoon in the back room behind that piano.

But it is the selection of that odyssey that has made me who I am.

There are two things you have to remember about an anomaly:

  1. It is never immediately accepted.
  2. It always takes more work than you expected.

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

Anemia

dictionary with letter A

Anemia: (n.) a condition marked by a lack of red blood cells or hemoglobin in the blood, resulting in pallor and weariness.

When my doctor told me I was anemic, I fired back at her that she had a funny nose and big ears before I realized that she was just giving me the results of my blood test.

It seems that this exam pointed out that I didn’t have enough red cells doing their thing in my body.

She wanted to rectify this by having me take iron supplement pills.

Now, let me tell you–not only was this treatment fairly expensive, but it created constipation, which was only occasionally relieved by the painful arrival of bowel movements that resembled lumps of coal.

At my next appointment, she asked me if I felt better since beginning the iron supplements. I had to be honest and tell her that it was difficult to tell since it seemed that I had replaced one problem with another.

Without becoming too philosophical, that is often the case in modern life. In a noble attempt to improve one dilemma, we create a counter-irritant, which we convince ourselves is not as bad as the original in order to justify our actions in alleviating the former problem.

Well, back to my anemia.

Quietly, against her orders, without her permission and knowledge, I lessened the dose on the iron and loosened my difficulty. It was such a relief that I decided to stop taking the iron pills, and tell her that I did, so as to make her happy and keep myself…well, let us say, comfortable.

The truth is, I felt no more energy taking the iron pills than I did without them.

I just happen to be one of those big men who moves fairly slowly, still gets things accomplished, but looks rather ugly in the process.

So the next time somebody tells you you’re anemic and they’re not referring directly to your choices, lovemaking or personality, be fully aware that iron supplements are a two-edged sword.

And one of the edges of the sword really hurts during bathroom time.

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