Darling Sylvia,

Thank you for teaching me the names for feelings.

Taxonomy is the science and the art of assigning names. Dr. Kapp at Alma taught me that yellow flowers are not all the same.  The hue and saturation points of the yellows of marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, and black mustard, Brassica nigra, are different.  Those differences allow a pollinator or a neophyte botanist to tell them apart at fifty yards. Dr. Eyer taught me the songs that separate the ordinary Pine Warbler, Dendroica pinus, from the extraordinary Kirtland’s Warbler, Dendroica kirtlandii.  Dr. Sloan taught me the color and textural differences between a fossiliferous brown roofing shale and a lignite. The differences in the rock make for distinctive pollen and spore floras. The names and their meanings that I absorbed from my professors made and make my world more colorful, filled with joyous tones and more physical textures to experience.

Over the last fifty-five years, your lessons in the names and the meanings of feeling words far out rank any learned from my professors.  Names have changed my behavior. When you tell me, “That pinched,” it tells me that I SAID OR DID SOMETHING THAT HURT YOU.  I have to ask myself, “Was it intentional or was I just being stupid?” CLEANING YOUR FISH says that I honor you and that a lady does not need to ruin her nails if a man who cares for her is near.  Your dad always cleaned your mother’s fish; it was not about entrails, but a value placed on his woman.

Grayling’s 501 Ottawa Street men’s dormitory was the Sahara Desert when it came to the names and meanings of feeling words.  Mad or glad was as nuanced as it got.  I had no clue until you came into my life that feelings had color, sounds and textures just like the qualities of the natural things in my world. I had feelings; who would have known?  More importantly, you had feelings that I needed to recognize, honor, and try to understand.  I need to learn and keep learning who I am and who you are in order to know and to be known more fully.

Sylvia, you ring my bells. — Eddie Bert