Curious Incidents of a Flailing Mermaid

Day Thirteen: words and stories

Well, yesterday marked my minus one-year wedding anniversary, which technically is a non-event. Today, however, marks my two-year WDC anniversary. Over the last four months, or so, I have become increasingly addicted to this site and have grown to adore it. Therefore, I am hoping to do myself justice with today’s post, in celebration of this fact.

Here goes…

Prompt for day thirteen: What are ten of your favorite words (whether they be your favorite because they are fun to say, fun to spell, fun to remind other people how to spell, have significant meaning, or some other reason)? List them at the top of your entry, then use them all in a short memory of an experience you had as a child. (Be sure to bold the words so I can see them)


The words:

1. Procrastination (great word and something I do a lot of)
2. Lion (associated to childhood memories – see below)
3. Connotations (just like the sound)
4. Cricket (hate the sport, love the word. Especially when said by a Yorkshire man)
5. Wobbly (describes myself ;))
6. Stillness (everyone needs to experience stillness – I struggle! Heh)
7. Confidence (a powerful word I use daily)
8. Snakes (I like it because it really suits the animal)
9. Africa (the word sounds like it belongs to a great continent and brings back memories)
10. Guarantee (I always spell this incorrectly. When I get it right I get excited! It’s like my very own mini writing challenge)

The story:

I’ve always been exceptionally good when it comes to the art of procrastination. Even as a child, when I lived Africa and the school pet was a lion. Yes, a lion! No, it didn’t eat people! Although, it was free to roam the school as it pleased. So, I suppose it had ample opportunity to eat as many 4-11 year old children as it wished. Luckily, we never seemed to be to his taste. Nevertheless, I digress!

My brother and I have always had a love-hate relationship. Much like all other siblings, no doubt. When we were young, our disagreements tended to rotate around the sport of cricket. I hated it, he loved it – it is genuinely that simple. I am pretty sure that, for most of his youth, my brother dreamt of being an international cricketer. He could have done it, of course, had he not, in his later teenage years, discovered distractions that did little to encourage the growth of an international sports person.

Nonetheless, my brother was very keen on playing cricket in the garden as a way of practicing his skills and honing his talents. Unfortunately for me, I was frequently “the chosen one”: the one who was forced to play with him after school, because my father, inevitably, would refuse.
I ought to mention, at this point, that whilst in Africa my brother did not own the proper cricket equipment. Rather, he used an old, broken table leg, which was pretty heavy and cumbersome, and an old tennis ball. I swear he spent more time trying to dig this ball out of the garden bushes than he did actually playing with it.

“Fran! Come and play cricket with me!” my brother would shout down the hall, most afternoons.

I always knew this was coming so, with confidence, I shouted back “in a minute! I’m just doing something important.” Of course, I was never doing anything important: I was a child. I was merely utilising my generous procrastination skills.

Occasionally, I would let my confidence run away with me and add “get Arnold to start a game with you and I’ll join in later.”

Now, Arnold was our gardener and was the only one of us that enjoyed cricket as much as my brother. This was not, as you might think, a good thing. Arnold was a better cricketer than my brother and this rarely went down well.

Therefore, the connotations of what I had just said were never going to be good. I always sat waiting for the repercussions. I could almost guarantee he would come into my room, pick me up (he was 8 years older – you couldn’t tell) and threaten to feed me to the snakes he had found in the garden. Little did he know that this never scared me, I merely pretended it did.

One day, instead of the snakes, he just came in, holding his “bat” and pleaded with me to play. When I begrudgingly agreed, he casually threw the bat over to me, clearly expecting me to catch it. Of course, being the wobbly little girl I was, there was absolutely no chance I was going to catch that table leg! Mind you, to give myself credit, I gave it a really good go. Unfortunately, however, the clunky wooden leg caught my thumb and took it to places it was never destined to go!

My thumb wasn’t broken; luckily it was just badly bruised. I say luckily, at the time I was actually annoyed it wasn’t broken: I figured that if it had have been I could’ve held it against my brother forever more. I did, however, discover something else to dislike forever more: x-rays!

That day I had my first ever x-ray and vowed never to have another one. It started off well, I was relaxing into it, and my thumb was in the right place and relatively still. Then came the doctor’s voice: “keep still, Frances”. BOOM!! My relaxed stated was ruined.
Stillness is not my friend. I have Cerebral Palsy: I do not do still unless I am asleep or very calm and relaxed. Telling me to keep still will, without doubt, have the opposite affect. It’s like telling jelly not to wobble and then shaking the plate. The more I try to keep still, the less likely it is to happen. Needless to say, the x-ray took a long time.

This still happens… “Keep still!” Noooooo!!

I had a MRI Scan a few years ago for an injury I had. I was dreading it since it was going to be a long time to keep still. I got in there, settled down and did an awesome job of relaxing. Twenty minutes in, the voice came: “keep still, Fran!” At which point I declared that the scan was ruined and asked to be excused from the machine!