No Business Like Goose Business

I have it on good authority that I am a “moron.” The authority in question is my husband, Sean, so it doesn’t get any more authoritative than that.

Most recently, this judgment was pronounced yet again—this time for my enthusiastic mistranslation of the Mandarin word for “penguin.” As best I could work out, it literally means “business goose.” I think any fair-minded reader would agree that this is truly hilarious.

Predictably, Sean immediately rained on my parade.

Turns out it only sort of means that. The confusion has something to do with those infernal tones Mandarin uses to confer different meanings on what is essentially the same word. Sean calls them “tunes” rather than tones, which may explain why he was unable to provide a satisfactory translation of his own language.

The best way I can explain Mandarin tones is this: Pretend the English word for “cat,” when pronounced like “cat?” means the furry domesticated animal we’ve all come to know and love—while vacuuming prodigious quantities of its hair off the furniture on a daily basis. But, when pronounced like “cat!” it instead means “salad tongs.” I know that may sound like an exaggeration, but I assure you it’s not.

With the Mandarin word for “penguin,” the part I had mistranslated was “business.” When I asked Sean what it actually meant, he hemmed and hawed, apparently uncertain how to explain it. Finally, he held one hand above his eyes and peered intently into an imaginary distance, pantomiming what I could only presume was a penguin.

So . . . a very attentive goose, perhaps?

Well, excuse me, but this penguin impression of his certainly looked to me as though it meant business.

Still, I understood the point.

*

Since retiring from full-time medical practice, my brain has been making the most of the greatly increased amount of unsupervised time I am blessed with. “Business goose” is merely the latest production in the theater of the absurd playing between my ears.

A good friend of mine once observed that when it comes to any silly notion that pops into my head, I have a tendency to take things right to the edge, and as they put it, “do little pirouettes.”

That’s me, for sure. I won’t even try to deny it. I’m the Baryshnikov of balderdash, the Nureyev of nonsense. I don’t seem to notice when I’ve taken things too far because . . . well, I’m so busy taking things too far.

I have been like this ever since I can remember. I suppose it’s why I relate so much to the recurring Calvin and Hobbes character “Spaceman Spiff.” Many interminably long afternoons as a fourth-grader at St. Mary’s were spent inside my head imagining things similar to Calvin and his alter ego Spiff, while Sister Rosalia droned on about fractions.

At fifty-seven years of age and freed from the full-time grind of medical practice, I have decided to convert these idle musings into written form. Whether people will find the results worth reading is anybody’s guess, but I have to say they entertain me to no end. When my brain stumbles upon a semi-plausible—and gloriously inaccurate—translation of the word “penguin” as “business goose,” I am constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone. I simply must write it down. As a software designer might say, it’s not a bug—it’s a feature.

I mean, how can anyone expect me to hear “business goose” and not immediately think of the venerable Mother Goose? Have you met me? When I stumbled upon “business goose,” it was as if my imagination had crested the top of an ancient Coney Island roller coaster—and the brakes suddenly failed.

Whee!!

It only stands to reason: Business Goose is a relative. Perhaps he is her favorite son, the chief operating officer of Mother Goose Enterprises.

Of course, one must then surmise the existence of Silly Goose, in charge of the creative division, and Duck-Duck Goose, responsible for accounting, as well as recreation at the annual company picnic. Wild Goose is also running around somewhere, chasing acquisitions he is never quite able to successfully conclude.

Imagine the board meetings! They must be absolute chaos, what with all of the never-ending seasonal migration—north to south, south to north—honking and feathers flying.

And let us never forget their British relative Grey Goose, nominally in charge of “import-export,” perpetually photographed leaving various tony restaurants and clubs with people Mother Goose claims not to know. No one can quite explain his offshore accounts, but the family Christmas parties are rumored to be spectacular, with all of the world’s biggest celebrities . . . flocking to them.

Ahem.

There is also Lucy Goosey, the bohemian cousin with gesso on her feathers, three unfinished art installations, and a grant application titled Migration as Memory: A Study in Breadcrumbs. Mother Goose doesn’t understand the work, but tells everyone Lucy is “very gifted.”

I can see Lucy featured in a painting styled like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, except this is Goosetina’s World. It features a lone white goose sprawled in the dry grass, neck stretched toward a weathered farmhouse, quietly yearning for either artistic transcendence or the grain bucket. Probably both.

Lucy Goosey insists it is “a meditation on distance, disability, and migratory longing.” Mother Goose says, “It’s very nice, dear, but do wash the oil paint off your beak before you come to the dinner table. And take off that silly beret. It keeps falling over your eyes.”

At this point, my Iowa roots kick in and I think of Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic, only featuring the farm couple as two serious, unsmiling waterfowl. Father Goose is gripping the pitchfork with grim Midwestern resolve, while Mother Goose stands beside him in an apron, looking as though she has opinions about your housekeeping, your posture, and your life choices.

Because they are such sober geese, there is not a single drop of Cold Duck or other Grey Goose improprieties anywhere in sight. Just hard work, moral backbone . . . and a casserole cooling on the sill. A chicken pot pie, perhaps?

Scandalous.

Lucy Goosey, of course, would call this painting a “subversion of agrarian identity through avian embodiment.” Business Goose would want to license it for the family holding company lobby. Grey Goose would be invited to attend the next Academy Awards ceremony and thus too busy picking out a new Hugo Boss tie to comment.

And Silly Goose? She’d be standing just outside the frame wearing the curtains and a pair of Groucho glasses.

*

At this point, some of you may be utterly exhausted by the little play unfolding inside my head. However, as a late-night infomercial huckster might say:

“But wait! There’s more!”

I next picture the American Gothic scene relocated somewhere to the Canadian Maritime provinces. The painting now features a weather-beaten clapboard farmhouse under a gray Atlantic sky, salt wind gusting in off the water.

In the foreground is a stern upright gander in suspenders, boots, and a rain hat—his equally formidable wife standing beside him—both with the expression of geese who have seen three nor’easters, two cod shortages, and your foolishness from a mile away.

“But why on earth did your mind jump to the east coast of Canada?” I can hear you asking.

Excellent question.

I’ll tell you why: Because the title of this particular painting practically writes itself: Gander Newfoundland.

After that, well . . . “Stu Brunswick” popped into my head almost immediately, somewhere between my third cup of coffee and the complete collapse of the remaining tatters of my dignity. Stu is Gander’s slightly disreputable brother-in-law who runs a chandlery, knows everybody at the docks, and is always “between business arrangements.”

Mother Goose calls him Stewart when she’s angry.

*

The thing that has always baffled me is how this stuff comes to me unbidden. I didn’t sit and ponder it at length. I didn’t spend days storyboarding it. I just went from incorrectly deducing the Mandarin word for “penguin,” being amused by that, and then the next thing I knew, I was sitting at my MacBook dashing out this 1,400-plus-word bit of piffle in Vellum.

It seems I have earned Sean's affectionate moniker of "moron" fair and square. It’s entirely deserved—and clearly bestowed with great tenderness.

I take it to mean: “The man I love has once again pilfered a perfectly ordinary noun from Mandarin, failed to stick the landing in translation, and then proceeded to build an entire extended-family mythology around the event. Now I must live with Stu Brunswick and the rest of the imaginary flock.”

And honestly? I don’t view “moron” as an insult. It’s Sean’s pet name for me with an eye roll attached.

I’m sure even Mother Goose would agree.