memoir, volume 3, chapter 21: the learning years

Grammar trips me. I'm usually sure-footed enough to navigate most simple writing terrain without too much problem---until that is, the inevitable grammatical error. It jumps out onto my path and messes with my footing, sending me clumsily down like a fool who thought they knew enough. I blame it, of course, on my grade ten English teacher who, if she hadn't been so unpersuasive in imparting the importance of properly structured sentences and appropriate uses of adverbs, prepositions and the like on us (onto us?), her late-afternoon class, then I (and very likely a few other of my sleepy classmates) would be, to this day, deft at handling sticky writing situations (run-on sentences included).

And, as far as my hit-or-miss grammatical skills go, it doesn't seem to matter enough that my very own mother was also an English teacher. Although she frequently corrected my speech (my misuses of tenses, mispronounciations and poor word choices in general), she herself would, on certain rare occassions, during emotional apexes no doubt precipitated by my unruly behaviour, promptly disregard all elements of Standard American English. Down would come her wrath and out the window would go her diction, conjugation, along with her poise. From her lips would escape the tethered, foul-sounding creature that had lain dormant within her schoolteacher frame. And, when she would open her mouth to release her fury it would seem as though all of south side of Chicago would come pouring out.

Not to say I wasn't impressed by my mother's linguistic metamorphoses---she could do to the English language what the Incredible Hulk could do to cars. It just gave me cause to reason that grammar, to say, proper grammar, may, like most things, have its particular time and place. Understood: rules are made to be broken; but they must first be learned. So, to that effect, it is my earnest objective to try my very best-est whenever I write. But, should I occasionally stumble on a syntax or two, please know it was likely not my intention, but that I will eventually right myself.