The Broken Eliminator

      My Mom's boss, Mr. Danieu, had a successful career as a lawyer in North Boston. His clients paid well, even if some of them paid with cans of pure maple syrup, and even if some of them did not smell real good in their unwashed overalls. Mr. Danieu was close to retirement by the time my Mom came along to be his secretary, and he enjoyed many of the finer things in life – two of them being opera and golf.

       Mom was left alone for many hours of the work day while her boss was either in court or on the golf course. I don't remember if he spent more hours at the office in the wintertime because it was too cold to play golf – but he did get away for a while each winter to play golf elsewhere.

      There was a famous course that Mr. Danieu went to in North Carolina every winter for a while. I remember he sent us a post card from there once, and I kept it for a long time.

      One year, when he returned from the golf course in North Carolina, Mr. Danieu was laughing about two incidents that had occurred on the trip. He said that one day on the course, he decided that his golf shoes were too uncomfortable and he was going to get some new ones if he got a chance later that day – and as he caught his caddy's eye, Mr. Danieu asked the caddy what his shoe size was? The caddy replied 13 ½! “Oh that's too bad,” Mr. Danieu said, “I would have given you these size 9's if you could wear them.” A little while later, the caddy said, “Sir, my feet are just sloshing around in these 13 ½ shoes!” Mr. Danieu gave him the size 9s!

       And then one morning Mr. Danieu was ordering breakfast at the clubhouse. The waiter was walking away, and Mr. Danieu called him back, and he said, “I've changed my mind, please eliminate the eggs.”

      The waiter said okay, but returned from the kitchen a minute later and said, “the cook said to tell you the eliminator is broken this morning!”

      Mr. Danieu loved to use big words in his dictation and in conversation. Mom would come home with the big words and she and Dad would then start to use them in conversation also. The ones I remember most are copacetic – as in is everything copacetic? And insinuate – I don't think I heard other people say insinuate or even read it in a book until late high school

      . And I loved using big words in front of my daughters – why talk down to them? One day a Mom said to me that her daughter told her that she could not understand anything I said because my words were too big!

       I have to give at least some thanks to Mr. Danieu and his broken eliminator for my vast, arcane, and sometimes silly vocabulary!

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