The Semi-colon Rule (or Really, Virginia?)

Tip-toeing to the living room at 3:55 a.m. with reading materials in-hand: People magazine and Mrs. Dalloway.  Jennifer Lopez and Virginia Woolf.  Fluff & fancy and fluff & fancy.  (Hmm, I practiced Venn diagrams with Liam yesterday.  The vision of JLO’s and Virginia’s circles somehow intersecting?  Wow.) I picked up People first: a cover-to-cover 45-minute read.  Then, I opened Mrs. Dalloway and, on page one, butted heads with the over-use of semi-colons; a different use than I taught in my Developing English classes with incoming college freshmen.

I understand the semi-colon’s use to separate complete thoughts; when you use them to connect related but separate thoughts, they can be quite effective in providing sentence variety.  Or, when there is a complicated list of items and each item is several words long, then they are helpful.

But to plop them in willy-nilly… they accost my grammarian senses at 5:00 a.m.  Wave after wave: reading of a clause or a fragment then bashed into the brick wall of a semi-colon.   I put the book down, and I remember what I told students as they grumbled with all the grammar rules: learn and master the rules before you break them.  I do it.  Love every minute of it.  My stream of conscience writing is in fragments.  Virginia’s is dotted with semi-colons.

I do hope Virginia knew the rules of semi-colon usage; it would make it easier for me to read her if I was absolutely sure she had command of the semi-colon rule and then purposely chose to manipulate it to her own writing style; I would accept that; however, I will need to better prep myself before reading page one again; I must release the ideal that semi-colons separate complete thoughts; rather accept the notion that this literary genius of the 20th century chose them to accentuate her character’s ADD.

My fragments feel right.  They reflect the 21st century’s culture of ADD; however, stream of conscious fragment-writing with the use of semi-colons… I struggle with that.  Really they aren’t that far apart – just a comma extraction and the addition of a capital letter moves the fragments from their run-on appearance to abrupt, jerky thoughts.

Next time I pick up Mrs. Dalloway, I will accept the semi-colons, and I shan't have a candy appetizer of People magazine's simple sentences beforehand.  That will help.  Most definitely.

Top 5 January Conversations

After Liam, my 9-year-old’s productive cough: “Mom, I have mucus on my shirt!” After 10 days of Will coughing, the doctor’s diagnosis: “I really think it’s a virus; give it another 10 days.”

Liam, while digitally measuring his fever under his arm for the fourth consecutive day: “Yup, the numbers are still increasing!”

After Will, my 11-year-old, goes night skiing with his school’s ski club for the first time: “I even went down a slope that wasn't lit!”  Me: “Perhaps the slope was closed?”  Will: “No there were lots of tracks.”   And I couldn't bring myself to say, “From skiers earlier in the day?  As in… the past??  The daylight??”

Me to Bill, in preparation for the Blizzard of 2015: “You might want to pick up fire starters for the fireplace on the way home.”  Bill: “Do we need anything else?”  Me: “Yes, marshmallows and Hershey’s bars.”

For you see, we know that we don’t need to strip bottled water off the grocery store shelves during a blizzard.  All the things I need to know for a blizzard I learned by reading Little House on the Prairie -- and living on the prairie for a good number of years:  Snow is frozen water, folks!  But big-ass Hershey’s bars don’t spring from snow banks.  I sent the right man for the job; I never buy this size Hershey’s for S’mores...

Gotta love that man.

Blockages

Rarely do I have writer’s block. Often I do get in the way of myself and not carve out time to write. That’s not for a lack of words. That’s a different blockage than writer’s block.

Have you heard crickets chirping the last few Hump Days? Ah, yes. Linda Malcolm the writer has been researching. Living. And today, I’ve made the time, and the words are stuck in my fingers like a heavy log jam on a river.

Blockages. They ran rampant in the Malcolm house over the last few weeks. Noses. Sinuses. Chests. Intestines. My head with worry over said noses, sinuses, chests, and intestines. Christmas decorations. Laundry. Sewer lines.

We turned the corner last Thursday with the arrival of loud, heavy equipment necessary to clear a major blockage. Before Christmas the bathtub on the main floor had a bit of funny dirt in it. I wrote it off to someone washing something and not rinsing the tub. Then another day, a different kind of dirt. Thinking someone had ignored the “4 Squares, 4 Squares, Flush” sign,  I gave the toilet a quick plunge. A couple days later, Bill called me while I was out, “The toilet is overflowing!” For no apparent reason.

The town said, not mine! The plumber said, not me! The drain specialist said, for a few hundred dollars I'll shoot a 1-minute video of your sewer line! The drain specialist then said, not mine to fix – I just take the pictures of rocks and roots in the old clay pipes – and recommend that you use 1-ply toilet paper and don’t use your garbage disposal!

Last Thursday, the sewer line specialists pulled in with a back hoe and a jack hammer. Such a welcome sight: a brand new, 4-inch, light cyan green, PVC pipe laying in a 4-foot deep, 42-foot long trench, dug through the year-old grass sod. Honestly, after three weeks of 1-ply – this was indeed a beautiful sight...

If you have a fragile sewer system, you understand: The humidity in an exhale starts the immediate decomposition of 1-ply toilet paper.

With the installation of this new line, all other blockages ceased within three days. Fingers crossed, next week will be a full 5-day school week since before Christmas, with everyone healthy and no holidays, and I will be in this same quiet spot in the library writing a Hump Day Short.

Now, may all the possibilities of a New Year freely flow forward.