JOY ALONG THE WAY: IT'S A DRIP: PICK A WORD, ANY OLD WORD

Once upon a time (what an original beginning!) the Writer's Digest, one of the two main trade magazines for writers, devoted a few pages each month to suggested topics writers might explore. This was to spur writers who had come to some kind of subject bloc and to show that most anything held some kind of reportage potential. I never tackled any of the suggestions but read them regularly and marveled at what an easy job the composer of those pages had. Thumbing through any encyclopedia, dictionary, newspaper, etc., one could quickly find a topic embedded in a word, just any old word. Think of how easy it was for the poetic walrus to find something to elaborate on -- shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. I've done shoes and sealing wax and cabbages.

Why, one might write about so mundane a thing as a drip. This occurred to me recently when I was trying to get a firmer grip on this century's happenings by reading Jules Archer's "The Incredible Sixties." I was not very far into the book before I became aware that there was the sound of a drip of falling water from the gutter directly into the floor of the down spout where it made a turn, seeming to punctuate what I'd just read. It became a sort of rhythmic beat to my reading such as, "It is a beautiful spring morning, a day that 20,000 students at Ohio's Kent State University will remember in horror and sorrow the rest of their lives." Drip. "Police dogs were used to back up racial demonstrators in Birmingham." Drip. "Hell, no, we won't go," "Burn, baby burn," "Never trust a man who hasn't done time, nor one who is over thirty," "Your place or mine?" "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. We are more popular than Jesus now (John Lennon)." Drip. "According to the Maharishi, Jesus had founded a faulty church because he had let his mind wander, leading to an absurd emphasis on faith. Faith, at best, the Mararishi declared, can let a man live and die in hope. The churches are driving people away because that is all they had to offer." Drip, drip, drip.

The down spot drip eventually stopped as did the book with the final sentence, "For better or worse, the incredible sixties will go down in our history as the stormy years that changed America." In a more-to-come sort of warning the book concluded,

"Social scientists suggest that waves of liberalism and conservatism come in 30-year intervals." The Depression '30s? Anyone remember them? The revolutionary '60s? Many people remember them. The '90s? That's us, now! Is this decade going to be a series of weary or exciting drips?

There is the evenly timed drip of water from a faucet that curls the edges of your temperament, especially if it is coming from a faucet that is advertised "to never drip again." Closely associated with this is the drip of water torture.

There is the drip of an icicle. Icicle drip is not altogether unwelcome, for where there is one icicle there are usually many and they don't all drip at the same time nor with the same sound decibel. One can even listen and make up some kind of tune to go with it.

More happily there is the drip of water in caves which form the magnificent stalactites, the drip from an intravenous feeding bag which can be monotonous but life-saving. There is the drip of your coffee maker, the drip of drip-dry clothes, the drip of your nose, the drip of a sun-sparkled dew drop from a Peace rose petal onto the thirsty soil below.

Looming large at this point is a further definition of a drip, that of a tiresomely dull person such as one who might choose to expound on the world of drips.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.