Stories about my wife

[Larry]

I promised I'd tell folks a story about my wife if I got sufficient response to a question I asked on the Forum.

First, a kind of a warm-up while I waited for the returns to come in.

Before Brenda became a novelist she worked for a relatively prestigious newsletter put out by the Research Institute of America, back in the day when their newsletter came out in print. This evening, I asked her, "Do you consider yourself a journalist?" Brenda replied, "Yes, because I have the mindset; I continually ask, 'Why? Why is that? Do you have the documentation?'" I really resonated with her reply, because, of course, I'm Mr. "show me the data."

Here is the background to the story.

This month I've spent a lot of time at the office working with my colleagues on some documents. I mentioned to folks that we need to be consistent in how we name things, "It has to be 'gray-eyed Athena' every time." No one understood what I was talking about. I suppose that it was because none of the others had had the same exposure to classical literature when they were young.

An epithet is a descriptive word or phrase used as a nickname or in conjunction with a person's name. One of the distinctive characteristics of the Greek poet Homer's style is an epithet, as in "rosy-fingered dawn" or "swift-footed Achilles." He almost always refers to the people in his poems (The Iliad, The Odyssey) with epithets. Since these were originally oral poems, they enabled the poet and the to remember the people, and they fit the verse. A name plus an epithet constitute a formula which exactly fits the metric structure of the verse. "Grey-eyed Athena" is one of the common formulae in Homeric poetry.

While I was working I had a chance to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, including one married couple. I got to eat with them, to see them speak about and then see them interact with their daughter. They are very different from me. Liberal, vegetarian, environmentally conscious. Their daughter was just thrilled that we have free soda at the office (I guess she doesn't get that at home), but she was insistent that she find a scissors to cut the plastic rings that hold the six pack together so that no animals would be caught in them.

I was struck by how well this couple communicated. But then it was obvious why. They had been together for 20+ years. They came from the same background. They not only lived together, but worked together. They shared a common background, a common history, and common assumptions. Even when they disagreed, they knew where the other party was coming from.

That made me appreciate the enormous depth of common experience my wife and I share. Even when we disagree, we know each other well enough that we can (if we put our minds to it) understand what each other is saying.

I promised you a story about Brenda. Here it is.

A couple days after my experience at the office, I asked her, "What is Athena's epithet?"

Her instant reply, "Gray-eyed."