#1 - Phancy
He had tore into his gift, ripping the wrapping paper away quickly and decisively, revealing a corkscrew and bottle-opener in an expensive-looking wooden box. "Oh nice! Thank you, Diane!" he said, turning to my mom, "Fancy!" Fancy? Well, I suppose. He had been calling everything fancy since I picked him up at the airport -- the leather seats in the car, my new haircut, the Christmas tree, the iconostasis at church, chicken wings, the symbolic Orthodox Christmas Eve dinner, a transistor radio, $5.99 Funky Llama wine, a Viagra pen, brandy-flamed saganaki, the Greek waiters who bellowed out "Opa!" every time they lit the brandy on fire for the saganaki, the beautiful voice of the French girl who sang us lullabies on New Year's Eve. He could have used cool, or nice, or beautiful, or lovely -- but time after time, he would encounter something slightly new and unexpected, or charming and intimate, or exciting and stimulating, and the same syllables passed through his lips always followed by a beaming smile--- FAN-CY!
Some were struck by its inappropriateness and dismissed it as a foreigner in love with a new word. Others were pleasantly surprised to see him elevating their tube socks, zippers, and rolls of toilet paper to such sublimically lofty levels. But as we traveled to place to place and I saw more and more objects touched by this wildly adventurous adjective, I began to see what he saw. This feeling somehow couldn't be described by such routine concepts like coolness or beauty because this was something that his own radiant personality illuminated itself. It was something that didn't exist until he found it, here in an old blanket, there in a refrigerator magnet. Like King Midas whose touch turned everything to gold, it was he whose touch made the world around him Phancy.
2 January 2009
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