My daughter, Amanda, was born in the cold, dark month of December, so I needed to get creative to keep us both entertained. One day, my mind shot out a limerick:
There once was a girl named Amanda / Who had an affair with a panda. / Their offspring, you see / Had no pedigree / So they laughed all the way to Uganda.
Chanting it, as I rocked her on my hip, she stopped fussing. Miracle of miracles, I was onto something! I’d stumbled on a way to give myself a self-administered shot of adrenaline while, at the same time, soothing my baby.
Rio, who was born three years later, somehow inherited my penchant for rhyme. Now a 31-year-old screenwriter in Los Angeles, he recently texted me, “I’m turning into you!”
Turns out, he responded to a piece of good news with an exuberant, “Groovy like Shaggy and Scooby smoking a doobie at a drive-in movie.” Aw, what a chip off the old block!
A few years earlier, he wrote a short film inspired by his dad’s illness called “Time to Go.” The character based on me tells her husband, “You make a mean daiquiri, Jackerie.” If Fred’s name had been Jack, that’s exactly what I would have said!
Growing up in the Sixties, I loved the song “Mellow Yellow” by Donovan, partly for its rhyming title. I had never heard “mellow” combined with “yellow.”
Yellow belongs on the hot side of the color spectrum, right? Fiery. Passionate. Anything but laid back.
But, if you think again, you realize that the color encompasses everything from a neon gold to a soft moonglow. A paler shade of yellow can, indeed, be mellow.
And, once you open up your brain to new associations, you can find them anywhere and everywhere. Take the electric banana in “Mellow Yellow,” for instance. Donovan got the image from an ad he saw in the newspaper for a vibrator. The tune perfectly captures the free-spirited mood of the times.
Every era puts its own spin on rhyme. The term “limerick,” for example, comes from an old Irish tune “Won’t You Come to Limerick?” Nineteenth-century limericks were known for their bawdy humor.
Recently, I wrote limericks for everyone who contributed to my 30 Poems in November benefit for the Center for New Americans. Donations poured in, especially after I cautioned everyone not to expect Shakespeare.
Then again, Shakespeare appealed to the masses of his own time, much as poetry slams and rap do today. Even though I don’t listen to hip-hop and rap, I was blown away by journalist Anderson Cooper’s interview with Eminem.
The rapper talked about bending sound to make it rhyme. He came up with the following for the word orange: “I put my four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with Geor-ge.” Eminem might be a high school dropout, but he’s post-doctorate level when it comes to rhyme.
Rhyming helps us remember things. Before people had written language, bards told rhyming tales to pass down stories from one generation to the next. In modern times, teachers convey useful tidbits of information in the form of rhyme. Who doesn’t remember, “I before E, except after C or sounding like ay as in neighbor or weigh?”
Psychologists say that pairing words by sound to create rhyme is like combining lines to form stripes or plaids. Regular patterns help give shape to the chaos of the world around us.
To tame our bottomless pit of disorder, we’ve stitched rhymes into the fabric of everyday expressions. Holy moly. Shop ‘til you drop. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
My grandfather used to send birthday poems with checks to his grandchildren. In this age of the internet, a fabulous website called Rhymezone.com makes rhyming a breeze. Just type in a word, and the computer wizard spits out a list of ready-made rhymes.
We can all write silly little ditties for our loved ones. But, if that’s too much trouble, a simple “Later ‘gator” might elicit a perky “After a while, crocodile.” Here’s to a little word play for this December day!
Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a writer who lives in Florence. She writes a monthly column for the Gazette that runs on the second Friday of the month. Reach her at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com.