Today started off significantly better than yesterday in that I do not, in fact, have a black eye. This is especially good, as we will be spending the afternoon at my mother-in-law�s celebrating my sister-in-law�s birthday, and I�d just as soon not have to explain a shiner induced by her darling grandchild.

AJ, too, seems to be in better spirits today � a relief to us all. We spent a pleasant morning making footprints in Play-Doh with an army of small plastic figurines, catapulting a menagerie of farm and zoo animals off of a toy bed with an ejection mechanism that is part of his toy farm (lesson learned: pigs travel farther than sheep, but sheep have more style in the air), and playing �funny sound.�

�Funny sound� is a game of AJ�s invention and has several variants. The original version involves AJ sitting on the floor of our walk-in closet with a pile of my rolled up socks and throwing them at dry-cleaning bags hanging in the closet. A related game called �funny sound way up high� involves AJ throwing the socks so they get stuck behind the dusty luggage on the top shelf that no one can reach without a ladder. Fortunately, I own a lot of socks.

A playground variant of �funny sound� involves the collecting of sticks and the banging or scraping of them on every available object to see what kind of sounds we can make. From this activity we have learned that the most interesting sound is made by raking a stick across the raspy treads of the slide, but the nicest sound, if you have a big enough stick, comes from banging on the center pole of the baby swings � it rings out like a church bell.

The current version, however, is my favorite. It began as a ball game. AJ would throw the ball against the wall and my husband would shout out words or nonsense syllables as it hit the wall. The ball part of the game, however, has now become superfluous. AJ and I now hold mock conversations in �funny sound,� e.g.:

AJ: Ayoogah! (imitates the horn of a Model T)

Harriet: Schnozzbot!

AJ: Noonoo!

H: Schnort-ge-twang!

AJ: Pigglewiggle!

And so forth. The game is over when we are laughing too hard to continue the exchange.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the realization of how ordinary words can fit into it. �Pickle� comes up fairly often, as do �fort� and �gumbo.� Every now and then it�s nice to revel in the sound of a good word. It�s one of the reasons why I love to read James Joyce. I�m sure I�m a Philistine for not choosing to excoriate the text to reveal its symbols. Sure, that�s fun too, but I love to read his words out loud. They feel good on the tongue. I am, however, reminded of a statement by one of my college professors, the teacher of a course in poetry. She said she thought the most beautiful word in the English language based on sound alone was the word gonorrhea.

Maybe sound isn�t everything. In any case, I don�t think that�s a word that will show up in our game any time soon.

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