Starting very early, my brother Maury began adding words to his vocabulary.    Now these
        words  were not to be found in any English Dictionary.  He made them up.  I think it began with the little thing,
        his sex organ, that Mama told him was his pee-pee.  He insisted on calling it the "goosle."  As in "look at my
        big goosle",  waving it above the water in his bath tub.   I later heard Boo, who was supervising the bath, laugh
        about it.   She told Nana that it was a big goosle.  However, I am convinced that Boo remained virginal all her
        life,  and had little experience with the subject.   This was the first word of his invention I can recall.
 
 
 

               Some of Maury's words were inspired by musical terms just then coming into use.  Be-bop, mainly.
        Yes, old Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were transforming jazz, pushing the envelope with wild
        improvisations, that became the soul and essence of jazz in the fifties.  Maury used to say:  "Be-bop, bologna,
        I've been bam-boozled", a long time before Little Richard (or was it Dion?), came out with
        "Be-bop-a-looba she's my baby....".  Scat singing could be heard by the late 40's.  Fa-doo-be-doo's, and
        baba-dow's were getting common as vocalists would imitate sax or trumpet intonations and articulations, and
        indeed instrumentalists would often brake into a spontaneous riff of voo-be-doos to finish a phrase.  Singers
        learned from instrumentalists, and vice versa.  Louie Armstrong thrilled us all with that slurring gravely  voice, in
        such hilarious and compelling renditions of standards:   it would buzz in your head, get under any downward
        turning thoughts, and scoop them up, and dump them out of your skull.  That guy had the greatest way of
        making all who heard him smile with that texture:   and when he blew into his horn,   all magic and beauty and
        wonder would explode. Satchmo remains.  Satchmo lives.   Satchmo forever!!!

                Boo never warmed up to modern music, though.   She called a big band jazz piece, a "skwee-dump".
        She was pretty good a making up words too!  Boo loved opera.   She tuned into the Met broadcasts each
        saturday matinee religiously. That gothic radio in the corner by the window,  would bring in Milton Cross and
        Carmen or Trovator every Saturday, brought to you by TEXICO.  (You can trust your car to the man who
        wears the star.)  She loved Lucia, especially if Lilly Pons was singing,  and Aida and Rigoletto, with Licia
        Albanese and Mario Del Monaco, or Zinka Milinov.  But when they did Stauss's Elektra one season, she
        drew the line.   "There is not one pretty note in this whole opera!", she pronounced. (I, needing money,  was
        painting her bedroom a bright pink that saturday.  The music went up the latter and into the paint, I think.  I
        rolled and rolled over the old wall paper which had the annoying tendency of stripping off on  the roller.  Also,
        the cobwebs were not taken care of, and a dusky shade occurred as the latex combined with the grime.  Not
        afraid of murky colors, I had no problems, and Boo, bless her heart, would never say anything.   But I  kind of
        liked the sounds of this opera, even if I did not understand the style or the subject.  I just loved the voices.
        Helen Traubel as Elektra sent me into a dream state. Something about the timbre of a rich female voice
        resonates almost erotically in my skull.  Regine Crispin just drives me crazy.   I have loved opera passionately
        since those days.  (But  I had not yet discovered German Romanticism, and did not know the Illiad then
        either.)
 

                        "Nima!",  Maury would exclaim.  "Noonie!!!  Noonie!!!"   (Look!!!.  A cute girl!!!!)  He
                said this one day on the beach at Pawleys, and a cousin of Marian Huggins was walking by in a
                very cute swim suit, heard him, and came over.  Her nickname:  Noonie.
 
 

                Breasts were "bazoomas".   I have forgotten many expressions, and so has he.  Sometimes he would
        drive us all crazy by demanding at the dinner table something in his own language.   Mama would finally give
        up trying to guess what it was, saying he was not going to get anything unless he started speaking English.  He
        learned common vulgarities from somewhere pretty early.  Snot was a favorite:   "It's snot, it's snot!  Pick it up
        and it's rot."  I heard him explain to Mama the third finger salute:  "This means: 'up your ass'.   And this means
        "up your ass with a beer bottle", holding up the second and fifth fingers (horns today in Texas.)    I was
        horrified, as he was about five years old at the time.  I am six years older, and had been instructed to use
        sunday school language and behavior in front of all adults.  No exceptions.  Even "fart" was a no-no.

                Another important Maurism was "geeter"  (with a hard "g".)  A geeter was a dollar.  "Gimme some
        geeters."  Uncle Maury was his chief sucker for money.   Each morning in the summer, he would hit our
        poor uncle up for a geeter, but usually got a couple of quarters, or maybe 35 cents.   This was enough to get a
        coke and a candy bar at the Exon station on Depot.  (Chal of course would have to have one too.)  Later, the
        coke was replaced with a drop.  A Sundrop.  Standards of comfort depended on the drop count.  But a soft drink was
        only a dime, so a dollar was a lot of money!  Thirty five cents was all that was needed.

                Names could be turned into instant Maurisms.   Prefixes followed his rules.    My name was
        "Presto-bongus".  Chal's was "Chal-bottom".   If a word or name ended in a consonant, it took a "-eenie", a vowel
        ending needed a "bottom" or "bongus"  Things got complicated.   I never could use them properly.
         Mama was simply  "Mammy-bird"  when it was not "Mammy-yokum".  I think the use depended on
         the syntex.   If she was being refered to as the provider/meat mother, it was the "Mammy-bird".  When she
         was addressed directly, it was "Mammy-yokum".

           Daddy did not have a Maury-name, but sometimes "Pappy-bird" was used.    Maury's
        email name:   mauryakin@........!!!!  From Jimmy Carter (not the ex-pres, but the fiddler from Salisbury):
        Maury-ac.  (Jimmy was the "Carter-ac".)

                In High School, my most frequent traveling companions were  Hugh Craig and Morrison Brown.  Those
        boys made up words too.  Our choir director,  Bill Tritt, wanted us to get a special liquid "l" on the word
        "Lord", which began a Russian Chorus we were learning.   He said to think the vowel "e" before the word
        "Lord".  E-Lord, thou art mighty...." We did not get what he as aiming at, but the idea of an "e" sound in
        certian words caught on.   The most common was the word "mercy", which became Me-ercy.  Hugh came up
        with "ble-ercy" for some reason, and that became an expression of crazy silliness, joy, happy surprise, or just
        to be silly.   I came up with "divine silliness", a sort of dada,  unconscience surrealism.   We were into Salvador
        Dali.  Art became important, and one summer,  1951 probably,  Morrison and I painted a mural on the walls
        of the basement under his Dad's surveying office in their backyard.  It was sparely furnished, and we made a
        Spanish village, with southern European architecture, complete with cathedral, cobblestone streets and a
        square.   Mediterranean types strolled around, a bull with a ring through its nose, a girl recumbent on a couch
        looking out a window, we called "Corn-hole Clara", as we gave her a seductive bottom.  The couch was a
        chaise lounge and real.  (We were 14 and virginal,  only dreaming.)

                        That summer, or the next,  I got to go to Pawleys Island with the Browns.  We enjoyed each other's
        company.   Morrison was very tallented in art, and I had always doodled and painted.   We had seen the
        movie "Moulin Rouge" a bunch of times. (We must have been 16, because Morrison and Hugh were driving.
        Sort of.)  We packed our paints and spent days recording the old houses and tangled live-oaks with their
        Spanish moss.  The sculpture at Brook-green Gardens.  The Greek-Revival chapel in the wild woods of
        twisted, tangled vegitation.   We stayed at the Ellerby cottage, had a big room to ourselves. The inn was a
        collection of buildings, the one we were in was called the Big Apple, and had been a school house in older
        time.   Ate the wonderful low-country sea food, some of which we helped catch, prepared by beautiful black
        cooks of Gula descent.   We developed separate painting tecniques, which stayed with us for life.   Morrison
        became a great Interior Designer, one of the most prominant in North Carolina.   Heck, the East coast.

                The Pawley's summer we played Scrabble.  I loved the game, but never got very good at it.  We caught crabs at
        the south inlet.  Bill, Morrison's father, fished in the creek that makes Pawleys an island.  And off the ocean
        pier, which was for public use then.  Later, they incorporated the pier with ugly condos which are popular, but
        mar the character of the Island.  (This was before we met Tony Huggins, and before he met Marian
        Coggeshall from Darlington.   Then we had access to Sandycott, the wonderful old house in the dunes,
        belonging to the Coggeshll/Williams clan.  Tony certainly made a good marraige.)  Bill could come up with
        some funny expressions we would laugh at:  after a drink or two, he would talk about going to the Dairy
        Queen, called it the "Madam Queen".  He told Maggie, Morrison's mom, his wife, that she did not need a new
        outfit for a wedding she was going to:  "All you need is a low neck coctail glass and a pair of pajamas!"
 

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