Randy Fitzgerald

My wife tends to talk back to the folks onscreen quite often, much the way she talks to the drivers in cars around her on the highway and-after they are safely out of earshot–any number of strangers who somehow offend her at the mall or the grocery.

Last Sunday at church she muttered into her program, “Now why would you think it OK to wear blue jeans with sequins to worship?”  I was quite relieved to look down at my pants and see that she wasn’t talking to me. I had thought for a second that I might have had an extraordinary senior moment when I was dressing.  But, thank heavens, she was speaking, sotto voce, to a college-age girl halfway across the sanctuary.

I guess we all really do a little of this, don’t we? I recall saying some choice things to a lot of really stocky, sturdy, strong-looking men who riled me during my life-but only in an undertone when I was sure I could not be heard. Some of my best lines have gone unappreciated.

But Barb was more than ready to tackle the TV station.  The newscast had included a feature about artificial Christmas trees vs. real trees, and a caption appeared on the screen that said something like, “Buy an artificial tree once and your done.”  It was the “your” that produced the scream.

“I can’t begin to count how many times I have graded papers and written in the margin “wrong spelling of you’re”-and here’s a newscast, a fount of truth and accuracy, taking civilization backwards,” she groaned.

You may have gathered by now that Barb is becoming feisty as she wends her way through her sixties. She has been perfecting her hissy fit quite successfully.

“And why not?” she tells me.  “There have to be a few benefits to getting older, and the only ones I can see, except for not being dead, are the right to say what you please, to take on anybody, and to get chunky if you wish.”

Barb has a hissy fit

Before I knew it, Barb was on the phone with some poor fellow in the WTVR newsroom, suggesting that they get a proofreader before they mislead the populace, corrupt our youth, affect our morals, bring down the Roman Empire-heaven knows what all she was telling him.

But I gathered from the constancy of her tirade, he wasn’t saying much in return.

At one point she changed direction and brought up an error she had heard on the CBS Morning Show the week before, though I doubt that the man on the phone could do much about that one. She was telling him, “Everybody thinks “between you and I” sounds more highfalutin than “between you and me,” so no one uses the correct form, which is, of course, ‘between you and me.’”

Can you begin to imagine how grateful he must have been that he was the lucky one to take this particular phone call?

We grammar teachers-and I have been one, too, off and on throughout my life-tend to be insufferable bores much of the time, along with linguists and politicians. The year I started graduate school, a linguistics professor died at his desk in his office, and as the rescue squad wheeled his body out under a sheet and crowds of professors and graduate students lined the sidewalk like an honor brigade, I overheard one of the other professors say admiringly, “He spent his entire life on the ‘ge-’ prefix.”

I vowed then never to come to that state, but an obsession with good grammar can lead one dangerously close.

Yet here’s the truth. There are so many grammar rules and variations in the English language that anyone who knows a little bit about the subject can often find an error of some kind in almost everything that’s written, whoever wrote it.  I have no doubt that someone will write me within 24 hours to point out a grammatical error in this column.

If you’re the one to do so, I promise I will take it in good spirit, and I will even be glad to hear from you. Perhaps we will start up a far-ranging discussion on grammar, since we are both clearly boring pedants, and establish a long-lasting friendship. We may start e-mailing each other with serious grammar questions and arrange lunch to discuss root words and the subjunctive tense.

So challenge me if you will. Of course, I make no guarantees as to what Barb might say about you under her breath.

I have had a strange, secret obsession for the past few months that I haven’t told anyone about.  I’m not really ashamed of it—it’s just one of those things that might lead people in observance to assume I’m totally out of my mind.  Those of us with this obsession—and there are at least several others besides me in the Richmond area—tend to keep very quiet, therefore, about this particular activity.
            OK, it’s time to confess—heck, you might even be one of the ones who have unknowingly benefited from my insanity.
 I’ve told you before that Barb and I enjoy making the rounds of a number of Goodwill and Salvation Army stores all over the area on Saturday mornings. It’s just a little fun thing we do together. She browses in the knick-knacks, usually finding an item or two that she can add to one of her little collections, like the small vases that fit atop and across the living room windows, or the tiny rocking horse collection that occupies some of the window ledges upstairs. 
She has great fun finding just the right vase or rocking horse for a buck or two and then finding the right place to put it when she gets home.
            I, on the other hand, spend my time in the book sections, trying to find maybe a first edition that got away from some estate or some recent novel I’ve wanted to read on the cheap.  Cheap is the operative word here, because hardback books at Goodwill go for $3, paperbacks $1.  But here’s where my obsession comes in—and I feel sure my sister, a psychologist, would diagnose this as a mental problem of some kind, possibly obsessive/compulsive behavior at least.
            I find it very hard to browse through the books without ordering the shelves. As I browse, I just have to put all those dozens of Danielle Steele novels together on one shelf, and all the John Grishams together.  Because this is Richmond , there are always a lot of Patricia Cornwell novels, too—and I can’t seem to leave until I make sure From Potter’s Field is alongside Body of Evidence.  I do restrict myself to rearranging the most popular authors, the ones who always have dozens of copies of dozens of books on the shelves—otherwise, I’d be there all day and really would qualify for a padded room and the care of a shrink.
 I get so wrapped up in this shelving pursuit that two or three times now I’ve had customers passing by ask me if I work for Goodwill.  I can see why they think so because I do really go at this effort with a vengeance. I have even been known to ask customers scanning the shelves what kind of book they’re looking for, so that I might then direct them to the proper shelf. Sometimes I even know exactly where to find the very book or author they’re looking for because obviously I get very familiar with what’s on all the shelves while I’m searching for one more Sue Grafton or James Michener.
You can imagine my relief when I began to find out other people do this, too.
          Barb recently ran into a lady named Debbie Vitale at the Goodwill on Broad Street near Parham Road who told her that she, too, often straightens and orders the shelves as she looks for books. Vitale shops books as kind of a business—she buys them for resale on eBay.  Barb was fascinated to see that Vitale carries a tiny little computer-like device with her, the size of a cell phone, that immediately tells her how much any book title she comes across and enters is currently selling for on Amazon.com, and how many people are buying it. 
            But in between entering titles and searching shelves, Vitale admits, she occasionally pauses to match authors and move their books together into one spot. Vitale has also on occasion come upon a fellow named Joe, who is kind of a legend among people who share our shelving obsession. Joe regularly frequents the Goodwill in Ashland and has the shelves in such good order that some days there it’s almost like going into a library.
            So last Saturday, when I found myself putting all the classics together at the Mechanicsville Goodwill, I wasn’t quite as worried about my sanity. As I found a spot to assemble Madame Bovary and To Kill a Mockingbird and Great Expectations, it occurred to me that there were not many classics to be found at Goodwill, a fact that interested me greatly.  People apparently give up their Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon a lot more readily than they part with Faulkner and Hemingway—which makes the copy I found of Across the River and Into the Trees all the more special.
            Barb says she’s not worried about me—in fact, she’s been known to do a little book shelving at Goodwill herself. But she has warned me she’s calling for help when I start to organize the cassettes and the record albums.