I heard my father say a word the other night that struck me. It was, “bored.” A waiter had said something in Spanish. My father said, “I know that word. That’s the limit of my Spanish, but it means something like ‘bored’.”
Why did this strike me? Because it’s a word that my mother used to use to describe her life. That she was bored. And all of a sudden, I heard my parents, so many decades divorced and apart – my whole life in fact – reunited in a single word. It was the same word and perhaps even more importantly, the same intonation. “I’m bored.” I heard it to mean, I’m bored with life.
I’m sure they learned that word together, as young people, 70 years ago. They learned to give it its meaning and its intonation. It was a shorthand for a whole world view, a telltale marker for “what I mean when I say …". It answered the question, “Who am I?” and it originated in their lives in 1959 but its origins must predate that.
They were busy learning and adopting an existing tradition, a world view, a point of view. They were taking it and reinventing it – adding their own twist to it – to make it their own. It was a musical riff and they were refining it for their tastes and their time. And it served them well. Through the course of their lives they could refer to it, both out loud and in quiet. It helped them deal with the challenges that life throws at a person.
When I heard my father say it the other night, I heard fatigue in his voice.