Michael D. Davis

I like words. Scratch that. I LOVE words. Twenty-six letters make up approximately half a million words in the English language alone. And those half a million words make up absolutely everything.

What I love more than words alone is the grouping of words into spectacular combinations. Now, I can write all day, and only one sentence or phrase that I’ve written will I truly love. And it’s probably a sentence that goes unnoticed by everyone else. It’s like building a house. All the other words that tell the story make up the bricks, wood, paint, and nails. Then, somewhere in the middle, there is an untouched gem of perfection hidden among all the metaphor and hyperbole, fact and fiction. One phrase or sentence that, to me, is the painting on the mantle of the finished home.

An example from one of my numerous supervisor’s articles is, ‘Hilmer still stumbled and tumbled a bit when it came to the monotonous particulars of parliamentary procedure, but he amended his unintentional missteps in a mirthful fashion.’ I can’t tell you why, but I wrote that sentence three months ago, and I still think about it.

When it comes to words and the perfect phrase or sentence for a particular moment, there’s nothing better than the comeback. Those barbs and witticisms volleyed to and fro by friend and foe. It is in the moment of the reply when you need to sew your words together without mistake. I, myself, am not good at this. More than often, I get stuck in my head, and whatever I say falls short. Unless we are talking via email or the like, then I can take my time and work it all out.

My sister, I believe, is like me in this way. Her comebacks often fall short of their target or shoot so far left that I don’t believe she saw the target to begin with. However, she has one comeback that is of legendary proportions. Years ago, we were taking diapers to my grandmother at the nursing home. A lady we knew was coming out of the nursing home, saw my sister carrying something and said, “ya bring me a present?” My sister immediately yelled back across the driveway, “Not unless you’re incontinent.” BOOM!

Now, my ma is the master of the comeback. Rage-filled, thought-out, or shot out quicker than a cannon; she can do it all. I have seen her say a comeback so fast that the person she said it to talked some more before it hit them. It was like the verbal version of that scene in those kung fu movies where two ninjas run past each other with swords, then there’s a moment of silence, and one ’em splits in two.

It is with my Ma that I learned that not all comebacks had to be verbal either. A decade or so ago, my Ma was getting harassed for a payment on a thing or whatever, I can’t remember, but ya know how it is. Anyways, this woman with the company sends a very rude two or three-page letter to Ma about the situation. What does my Ma do? How does my Ma respond? My Ma grabbed a red pen and went through the letter correcting every spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistake she could find. When she was done painting the letter red, she put it in an envelope and sent it on back to the woman. BOOM!

I mean, it takes a true Zen master to drop a killer comeback without uttering or writing a word. I’ve only ever seen her do that once again. It was when I was in school, and she corrected a letter home and made me take it back to my teacher.

The reason the subject of comebacks comes up today is because my Ma wrote one that I thought was good. She’d been having trouble scheduling a doctor’s appointment lately. The appointment repeatedly getting canceled. We got a call today, the message said, “Hey, I’m Sue with the Doctor’s Office, and I’d like to talk to you regarding your appointment.” My Ma, upon hearing this, went to her tablet and sent a message to the Doctor’s Office. And I will now end this little essay with the perfectly crafted first line of that message: Who the hell is Sue?