Seven words I won’t forget

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, June 29, 2008 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

Seven words I won’t forget
By Aaron J. Brown

When I was eight, a stroke of luck changed my life and taught me the majority of the dirty words I currently know.

That was the year I won the Weekly Reader National Invention Contest. I’m not bringing this up to brag. My invention was rather silly, never saw successful production and produced no financial security for my family then or now. But the trip I won to Washington, D.C., set the fires that still burn in me today.

We lived on a family-owned salvage yard in the southern swamps of northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. My family was hard working and my parents were smart, but life in a trailer house on the junkyard does not come with the social expectations of college, career and prestige that go to the children of the well heeled. But when this trailer house kid landed in Washington, a truth was unlocked. Most of the restrictions we encounter in our lives exist in our own minds, not in reality.

I learned this in part when I toured the halls of power in Washington as a tourist, but I also learned it late that night in the hotel room shared by my family. When I was supposedly asleep the television piped out HBO, an impossible luxury on the junkyard. This was the first time I saw George Carlin, the famous comedian who passed away last week. And yes, I was 8, and 8-year-olds, as a rule, should not watch George Carlin. Still, I’m glad I did because I could sense in Carlin’s routine the power of words.

Carlin was one of the most influential stand up comedians and writers of the late 20th century. Many people viewed him as controversial or crass because of the salty nature of his routines, but there was a deeper truth to his act. The lines drawn in society are arbitrary. People have the power to cross them when they are wrong or unnecessary. One such line was the one laid before a working class 8-year-old from the Iron Range, biting his pillow to keep from laughing too hard at what he was hearing on HBO.

Jump ahead. I’m in high school. My friend Dusty and I went down to Duluth to see Carlin at the DECC. The high school years are nothing but crossing, or not crossing, lines. Among other things, including romantic prospects, these lines separate the life teenagers believe possible and the life they believe beyond reach. Thanks to my trip to Washington, I never doubted that college and then anything were possible if I worked at it.

I spent my first night away from home, the first night I knew I was only coming back as a visitor, in a college dorm room in Dubuque, Iowa. My Puerto Rican roommate was due the next day so I was left in limbo, a space between the comfort of home and the sense of what was to come next. I was on the line. That night, I strolled down to the pop machine in my bathrobe (in any decade beyond the early ‘60s, I was the only guy on most college campuses who still wore a bathrobe) and bought a Country Time lemonade. I still remember exactly what I drank that night, a sense that would leave me in the years to come. I lit a cigarette and wondered what to do.

That night I put on the headphones to my Sony Discman (remember CDs?) and listened to George Carlin explain the seven words you can’t say on TV. If you know me, you know that I seldom say these words in the company of others. But it was these words, first when I was 8 and later, that showed me the power of words. What matters more than words are the people who use them and why they use them. George Carlin used his words, many of them deeply offensive if observed in a vacuum, to break down lines that didn’t need to exist. And he was really funny. I’ll always remember that.

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