Kirjahaku

Parvum Opus (Latin for small work) is a weekly column on the English language, and more, that I've been writing since just before Christmas of 2002. I'm an English teacher, writer, and editor: one of those compulsive readers and proofreaders. In the Middle Ages, when the great universities were established in Europe, students studied the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The Quadrivium consisted of arithmetic; geometry; music, harmonics, or tuning theory; and astronomy or cosmology. Someday, I may change Parvum Opus to Trivium Pursuit. My original intention was to write a short note on one point of English usage per week. It would be not just a grammar tip, but a comment on the way language is used and misused. The first issue was on the word "actionable", in which I explain why you do NOT want to create an "actionable business plan". But since language is always about something, I wrote about the substance as well as the form of language. I could not, for instance, ignore the Iraq war. My views on that and other public issues have shifted since that first year of writing, which lost me some friends and readers in subsequent years. A few years ago I shifted most of my political comments to my Cincinnati Independent Examiner column, at www.examiner.com/independent-in-cincinnati. Parvum Opus also includes a lot of comments, questions, information, and corrections from steady readers over the years. Sometimes they wrote the column for me, and I thank them. This volume even includes my poem about making mistakes.

The letters home of a Midwestern college girl and teacher would be of little interest to anyone but her family, except that she was an extraordinary person. Ellen Margaret Rowe (rhymes with Wow), 1935-2005, taught Spanish and English when I was a senior at East High School in Akron, Ohio, 1963-64. In 2000 Ellen unexpectedly asked if I wanted a paper bag full of her letters, hundreds of letters she had written to her parents beginning in 1953 when she was a freshman in college up through 1966. Ellen never married or had children and presumably didn't think any of her relatives might care to have her letters. Ellen was an enthusiastic and peripatetic student who fell in love with Spain, and inevitably with a young Spanish man. In the summer of 1961, while traveling through the mountains of Spain with him - he was driving her car - the car went over the side of a mountain. Her fianc was unhurt, but Ellen broke her spine and was never able to walk or use her hands freely again. And the engagement was broken. On a subsequent visit to Spain she learned shocking facts about Fernando from his relatives. Nevertheless she continued her studies and returned to teaching in 1963. She could walk with difficulty using a cane, but used a wheelchair too, and in later years had her "fleet" of motorized chairs. She always hoped for some kind of cure, but it did not come in her lifetime. But Ellen was intrepid. She never gave up traveling, and organized our school's (and perhaps the city's) first high school student exchange with the Monterrey, Mexico, Rotary Club (Yrator). She chose me along with five other students to travel by train to Mexico in the summer of 1964, where we lived for a month with Mexican families. It was a glorious experience for me. Ellen was dynamic, disciplined, kind, tactful, resourceful, practical, generous, and strong. She was a na ve girl, whose exuberance tended to take over, but she had a sense of humor about herself, and the relentless, girlish archness of the early letters softened as she matured. Her penchant for organizing and coming up with adventurous plans and projects was a magnet for people who "liked to do things," as an old friend said, who called her The Big O, The Big Organizer. "People laughed at me because I followed Ellen like a puppy dog, but she was great at organizing things and I liked to have fun." She was athletic, but when all that remained of her athleticism was the ability to swim for therapy, she complained about the public pool facility, but not about her lot in life. Ellen was an avid fan of ice skating all her life, even before her accident. Afterward it must have represented freedom of movement she would never have again, a freedom she admired from the audience, but did not resent.

Roxy Barbarino embarks on a major new series for her magazine Adventuress, covering the new euthanasia clinic in Akron, called Eufirst, replacing the abortion clinic in the public's hearts and minds. Competition appears from Cleveland's mafia don Vito Giacomini. who calls his innovative clinic My Way, and he involves lawmakers and international diplomacy to do it his way. This second book in the Roxy Barbarino series includes a few pieces of her work for her magazine Adventuress.

I conceived, yeah it's a pun, the idea for this story before reading that activists are demanding that the NHS provide womb transplants for gender switching individuals. That is, men who want to call themselves women. The most grotesque biological sci-fi fantasies can become real if "activists" decide to impose their version of reality and good and evil on susceptible individuals and private and government organizations and especially when they can get other people to pay for it. Warning, this story isn't suitable for anyone. It is a grotesque horror story but no more than the reality I read about every day. I had to write it to stop it whirling around my brain like a toad to borrow from The Doors. This story is a sort of sequel or update to my first novel, The Man from Scratch (available on Amazon in paperback), different characters, same theme. It's a Sunday School story compared to Timely Ripped. Writing The Man from Scratch revealed to me the value of accepting what nature and God give us. It means more than we can invent for ourselves out of the rag and bone shop of our hearts, stocked by human or perhaps demonic fantasy and random desire. This story will be included in my next novel " A Death a Day"