Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis Page B

on the sofa, and we were very tired first from sitting up with my father, and then from worrying about whether he was comfortable as he was dying, and then from worrying about where he might be now that he was dead, and your representative referred to him as “the cremains.”
    At first we did not even know what he meant. Then, when we realized, we were frankly upset. Cremains sounds like something invented as a milk substitute in coffee, like Cremora, or Coffee-mate. Or it sounds like some kind of a chipped beef dish.
    As one who works with words for a living, I must say that any invented word, like Porta-potty or Pooper-scooper , has a cheerful or even jovial ring to it that I don’t think you really intended when you invented the word cremains. In fact, my father himself, who was a professor of English and is now being called the cremains , would have pointed out to you the alliteration in Porta Potti and the rhyme in Pooper-scooper . Then he would have told you that cremains falls into the same category as brunch and is known as a portmanteau word.
    There is nothing wrong with inventing words, especially in a business. But a grieving family is not prepared for this one. We are not even used to our loved one being gone. You could very well continue to employ the term ashes . We are used to it from the Bible, and are even comforted by it. We would not misunderstand. We would know that these ashes are not like the ashes in a fireplace.
    Yours sincerely.

Thyroid Diary
    Tonight we are going to a party to celebrate my dentist’s wife’s graduation from college. All these years, while the dentist has been working on my teeth, his wife has been earning credits at the college, just a few at a time. Every semester, along with her other courses, she has been studying painting with my husband, who teaches painting and drawing at the college. She has been studying with him in a tutorial situation. She is an enthusiastic flower gardener and paints mostly flowers. She has written texts about her flower gardens, to go with her paintings. My husband told me that a flower painting of hers that was hanging in the Art Building at commencement time was stolen—by a student, he thought, or a student’s parents.
    I didn’t know she was actually earning a degree until we received the invitation to this party to be given by her friend, who is a faculty secretary at the college. A few days after the invitation arrived, we received another one from the same woman, but for a different date. I was sure there had been a mistake. But in fact she is simply giving two parties, and we are invited to both.
    Now I have to wonder why my serious and extensive dental work ended—which it did—just a couple of months before the dentist’s wife’s graduation. When the dentist said I didn’t need any further work, I thought I still had at least two more crowns to go. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t had more work to be done on my teeth.
    I have always been puzzled, anyway, by the economics of the thing, because I would pay the dentist, and he would presumably give his wife the money for her courses at the college, she would pay the college, the college would pay my husband a separate fee for her tutorials, and then my husband would give me money for the dentist, I would pay the dentist, the dentist would give money to his wife, and so it would continue. I thought that if no one paid anyone, it would work out just the same, but that didn’t seem quite right, either.
    This spring the dentist, who is a gardener like his wife, but grows vegetables and grapes, and has a small apple orchard, made the transactions a little more complicated by proposing to my husband that they share certain shipments of bedding plants which could be bought more economically in large quantities. He said they might share two varieties of tomatoes as well as some onions and peppers. My husband thought it over and then