Punctuate This

Don’t you just love punctuation? Tiny, humble specks on the page, but so so so in charge– efficient and tidy, almost invisible– until there is a problem. Proper punctuation is a beautiful thing. The basic rules are easy to follow, but I so admire anyone who knows the correct usage of brackets vs braces vs parentheses. That person has paid attention.

Even the most common of all, the comma, if misused– watch out. Do not mess around with the comma.

As a devout Catholic kid, every night I recited the same prayers. First came the formal, repetitive rosary, the meaningless slurring of words. Though I loved the phrase “Fruit of thy womb,” I had no clue, and like many other kids, thought it had to do with underwear. The Sorrowful Mysteries? Please. By the end of each Rosary, fifty three times I have admitted to being a sinner. Enough already.

But then came this closing prayer, invented by my mother, I guess so we ended on a more personal note:

“God bless Mommy and Daddy and Bunnie and Sharon,

(Bobby and Kevin would be added later) and me,

Grandmother and Grandfather, and all my friends and relatives.

Have mercy on all the Souls in Purgatory (what?),

and please make me be a good girl, God.

But what I heard– there was no comma between girl and God, so every night I went to sleep thinking I might wake up a Girlgod, fully capable of flying. I would be better than good. I would be an exceptional GIRLGOD.

I would do works of mercy and hang out with the Saints, having already read about them in “The Little Book of Holy People,” a collection of highly sanitized accounts. I was, nonetheless, particularly taken by Saint Theresa, a no-nonsense feminist who could levitate.

As far as I knew only God and Superman could actually fly without wings. But in my fantasies, I could fly too. Night after night, the three of us– God, Superman, and this Girlgod would swoop around and help people in trouble. We were making the world better, one rescue at a time. Every now and then, Saint Theresa would join us, but she could only get about a foot off the ground. She slowed us down.

So, that one little missing comma made all the difference for me as I struggled to understand the person I was becoming. And this is what mattered: Feeling powerful made me powerful.

I am a cancer survivor. Twenty years ago part of my colon was removed. After the surgery, one of my colleagues at Mass College of Art gave me a gift– a pin made from a single old typewriter key– : ;

COLON, SEMI-COLON.

Yay, punctuation.