Page 489 - WhyAsInY

sinGleD; out
“What’s wrong with this picture?” you and a horde of young ladies would have been winners immediately. To say that I managed to retain my dignity is merely to type the sentence “I managed to retain . . .” Well, you get the point.
Since the split, Danny and I had solidified and reshaped our bond, much as Rachel and I and Peter and I had come closer in new ways. But relationships would never be the same. We were now interacting in our own context, a context shaped by circumstance and shaped primarily by us.
Pain12 (and I Don’t Mean Bread)
While the kids and I now look back on those days for the most part with warm smiles, there is no denying that the separation was, at least at the start, cold, forbidding, sad, and wrenching. Divorce is not only a horrible process, it is a horrible fact, one that never goes away. While Phyllis and I have come to get along decently as time has gone by, and particularly well if there are problems that one of our children is having, it was not that way after Marcel and I loaded the station wagon, nor would it be for many years.
There remains tension when it comes to the many events that still involve us in discussion, direct and indirect. Even though the children are adults with mature lives that are very much their own, there are always holidays, events, trips, and other mundane occurrences that
12. Pain is our first intentional instance of the “Yavernym” in this book—it’s actually called a homograph, but my love of the phenomenon that I’m about to describe caused one friend of mine to hang the name Yavernym on it, and it stuck. Yavernyms, for the uninitiated, are pairs of words that are spelled identically but are pronounced differently and mean different things. Pain is what I have called a bilingual Yavernym. As pain is both an English word—meaning “suf- fering”—and a French word—meaning “bread”—it is a bilingual Yavernym; if the word pair is, for example, polish and Polish, we have a semi-proper Yavernym. For a list of Yavernyms, un- doubtedly incomplete, see Appendix C. (I also love—and would love to discuss—Euler’s equa- tion [e i π + 1 = 0], which my post–Mickey Mantle hero, the physicist Richard Feynman, called “the most remarkable formula in mathematics,” but even I know that enough is enough.)
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