Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from American writer Tom Junod…,
Noted American magazine writer Tom Junod said that his encounter with television personality Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) changed his perspective on life. In fact, it is the premise of the 2019 feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Junod is also the recipient of two National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors and a James Beard Award for his essay “My Mom Couldn’t Cook,” published in Esquire Magazine. But his recent book has a head-turning title: In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What it Means to be a Man.
An evocative and beautifully written memoir about his philandering father, the book also serves as a detective story. Exactly how dishonest was his father (and how many previously unidentified siblings might Junod have? Junod tells the story with style and admirable honesty. Here are my favourite images:
- He is almost as dark as my father, with a mat of curly gray hair on his chest and a high bald crown fringed with gray hair and a gap between his teeth and a nose of shapeless enormity mounted so high on his face that his eyes appear affronted by its intrusion.
- My mother can’t swim. I know this not only because of the way she approaches the ocean, bending at the knees and splashing her neck and arms as if the sea contains handfuls of eau de cologne…
- I stay with my dad while he drinks cocktails and plays Sinatra and Judy Garland on an old phonograph with an arm as thick as a spare rib.
- Milli’s tall, in heels almost as tall as my dad is “in shoes,” and is what my mother calls “brassy,” with a Medusa swirl of hair the color of a Mercurochrome stain.
- She has nails long enough to saw through the bars of a jail cell, each one decorated with a decal of a butterfly and sometimes festooned with tiny chains.
- Her name is Maura, a two-syllable Dickensian plea.
- My father, with two days of sun, is as brown as steak sauce and so lavishly anointed with oil and iodine he smells like a salad.
- She begins to strain against the pronged cane she had been grasping like a tiller until she managed to stand up and began tottering across the room.
- He doesn’t even buy clothes anymore. He either wears them to death, like the blue jeans that are faded to the color of skim milk and worn to the texture of cheesecloth, or he accepts them as handouts, like the polo shirts from his friend Vinnie sends him from Balboa Island.
- My mother went to the hairdresser for the occasion and the sight of her heading for a triple bypass with her lipstick freshly applied and her spun coiffure restored to its tensile strength reminds me of her special brand of pluck — her essential defiance.
- He was a scrupulously superficial man, believing so fervently in the magic of surfaces that his fervour almost passed for profundity. He was able to wear his soul quite literally on his sleeve, like cuff links.
- Eric Spruiell looks at me from across the counter, a sigh in human form.
- She was married to Uncle Harry Brandshagen, the original “good egg,” and watched Alzheimer’s nibble away at him before it devoured him in a few cruel gulps.
[Photo credit: Gabbo T. Licensed under “Attribution Share-Alike” 2.]
