Bullseye

One of my all-time favorite short stories is "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff. It's particularly short, but it's a real gut punch. It's about what happens in a man's mind when he gets shot in the head. For such a short story, it's richly textured, thoughtfully crafted, and carefully executed, appealing to my senses on multiple levels.

If you enjoy reading a good short story, check it out here:
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ro/www/LiteratureandMedicineInitiative/20080304/bullet.pdf

There's a whole lot I love about this story, but one of my favorite bits is the end, when the main character, Anders, relives a summer memory from his youth. Anders remembers playing pickup baseball in his neighborhood, and a boy who says, "Short's the best position they is."

Anders can't get over that phrase. He wants to ask the boy to repeat the words but doesn't ask because he thinks the others will accuse him of mocking the boy's grammar. They is, they is, they is. But the truth is, he is "strangely roused, elated by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music."

That line reminds me of this conversation I had with a custodian at my workplace. This conversation was probably almost two years ago, but parts of it have been ingrained in my mind ever since. The guy was telling me how he, when he was much younger, was once in a car accident where his car flipped over a few times into a ditch off some lonely freeway.

Now, I can't remember all the specifics of how he had survived. All I remember is that he talked about how lucky and blessed he was to have survived. With great relief, even years after the fact, he looked me in the eye and said, "I coulda been took."

When I heard that, I wanted to ask him to repeat it, too. Like Anders in "Bullet in the Brain." But I didn't want him to think I was making a thing of his grammar. So I just replayed it over and over in my mind. What a beautiful phrase.

I coulda been took, I coulda been took, I coulda been took.

I thought about this tonight, about "Bullet in the Brain" and my acquaintance the custodian. There's something poetic, something nakedly honest and even humbling about these grammatically broken phrases.

I often pride myself on my fine grammar, but the truth is that I am not a real master of grammar. Nope. I know some stuff, sure, probably more than the average bear, but I dare not consider myself a master. And yeah, I've most likely corrected people on multiple occasions (usually in jest, although I wouldn't be surprised at all if people didn't understand I was joking). But I am not a master. I can't explain all the rules of it and if there's a grammatical rule I struggle to grasp, I'm more apt to just rephrase the sentence into something that still means the same thing without having to learn that grammatical concept.

But I thought about this tonight because, as I was praying, I realized how messed up my grammar was. Is. Was? Is? Man, I don't know.

When I pray, especially out loud, I don't really premeditate the words I speak to God. I think of what I'm praying about and then I just pray. This often leads to awkward sentence structures, stuttering, run-on sentences, and starting way too many sentences with the word "and."

It makes me wonder how my prayers would sound if I took the time to write them down and then recited them. It makes me wonder what God thinks of my busted grammar. I hopes He finds a humbled spirit prostrate before Him.

I hopes, I hopes, I hopes.