Allowance
Like so many suburban kids in the 80’s & 90’s, I got an allowance.
The prerequisites were: Assist him with yard work on Saturday, change the litter for Gip & Chip (my 2 guinea pigs), clean up my room…and recite my vocabulary words.
I was a latch-key kid (like so many suburban kids in the 80’s & 90’s) and my father left for work about 10 minutes before I got home from school. In his wake, he’d leave me a note, handwritten on a lined pad, that spun a little tale about his day, something we’d done together recently, or discussing something I was struggling with in school. One of my biggest regrets as an adult is that I didn’t keep these notes, which I now see as priceless lost artifacts. (along with all those cool t-shirts I used to have).
At the end of the note, usually on the back of the page, was a word, copied straight from the dictionary. It even included the phonetic pronunciation along with the relevant definition. Obdurate. Trite. Lascivious. Lithe. Inured. Apropos. Brobdingnagian (one of my favorites).
It was my duty to save these five notes, (Monday through Friday), memorize their pronunciation and definition, and recite them back to my father at some point over the weekend. This was the final chore, the last hurdle I had to pass before I was granted whatever sum was agreed upon at the time.
Clever trick, right? I was spending a lot of time on my Smith-Corona typewriter back then, and he tailored a small part of my chores to benefiting my passions, not just landscaping and pet maintenance. Since we didn’t get to spend weeknights together, he made it a point to drive me into school every morning. He’d ask about what I was writing, and tell me about what he was reading. (which was a LOT of Russian literature, primarily Dostoyevsky and Nabakov). He’d also pop quiz me on some of the words, which I always passed on, (as I’d usually cram them all into my brain late Friday night).
All of this is to say: I was lucky, incredibly lucky, to have a father that not only understood my desire to write, but went out of his way to foster it. So part of the reason for doing this book is payback for all of that work he put in to make me a better writer. Because looking back on it now, those notes and those vocab words paid humongous dividends.
You could even say they were “brobdingnagian”.
-Ian Mondrick
1.24.25
