Nouns

Living with a 16-month old, I've been thinking a lot about language and its acquisition. It all begins with nouns, whether the starting point be Mama or Dada, cat or tree, airplane or book.

My son, before he started speaking, developed a commanding point. My husband determined there were in fact two different types of pointing at work. The first: Request for Transportation (bring me there at once!). And the second: Request for Identification (what is that called?). Now he knows verbs, too, but who needs them? He can string together beads of nouns into what my husband refers to as the inverse of circumlocution. He goes straight to the nugget of things. When I asked him one morning if he'd heard the thunder during the night, he replied, "Bang, Bang, Outside." (He loves onomatopoeia.) When he wants to be taken to the playground he says, "Swings, Whee! Outside." (According to my Merriam Webster's Dictionary, the word "whee" is classified as an "Interjection.")

As my mother pointed out, nouns are also the first parts of speech to go, as marbles age and memories fade. "Thing" becomes a great crutch for aging brains: "I need to go to thing," "Please pass me thing." Nouns: first in, first out.

There is something poignant, and downright biblical here. The significance of naming. A creative urge, to name the world. How powerful one feels, learning everyday new names for new things. You can see my son has a sense of himself as a conqueror as he wraps his mouth around a new word, a new thing known. And how terrifying, the reciprocal daily loss of objects, the sudden foreignness in the familiar, as the nouns start to recede.

My first story idea was a half-joke, a half-parody. The parody would be both of itself, and of other stories with extreme points-of-view (an accordion, a horse, a five-year-old). The thought: to tell a story from the point of view of, say, a 14-month-old, using only nouns. I'm quite sure noun-only stories have been told before. And I'm quite sure the results were comedic, and perhaps tedious.

But the idea that perhaps has more meat on its bones is about a grandparent and grandchild. I was imagining a grandmother and her grandson, as one of the greatest pleasures of the last year-plus of my life has been witnessing the love affair between my mother and my son. My son, Felix, calls his grandmother "Nonna," and when he wants to refer to the two of them together, as a duo, which is often, he calls out joyfully, "NonnaFee!" much like celebrity magazines refer to "Bennifer" or "TomCat."

But the grandmother I imagined is not my mother, and the grandson is not my son.

I imagined the grandmother living alone, down the street from her daughter and young grandson, in a small town, maybe in upstate New York. Somewhere pretty, and somewhat depressed. This description might apply to the women in the story, too. The men are missing, or fleeting. The grandmother babysits often, to help her daughter out, and because she likes it. But it is as her grandson begins to speak, to point commandingly at objects and demand to be told what they are, that this grandmother realizes her memory is slipping away. It seems to be slipping faster and faster, as quickly as her grandson gains a word, she loses one. And she does not want to tell her daughter, because she fears she will no longer be allowed to babysit, a noun-less idiot, she will be deemed untrustworthy, a baby herself, who must be watched and cared for, though without all the optimism and boundless potential of infancy.