I’ve been spending some time doctoring which means sitting in waiting rooms more than I like but it’s a great opportunity to catch up on my pleasure reading.  Right now I’m about half-way through Donna Leon’s latest book, The Golden Egg.  I’m not yet sure where the story is headed, but with Leon, it really doesn’t matter.  She writes can’t-put-em-down mysteries but it’s not just the mysteries that intrigue me.

It’s not even the cast of characters, headed by Commissario Guido Brunetti, his family, and his colleagues at the Venetian Questura (police headquarters).  What keeps me coming back to this author is her way of getting right to the nugget of things.  Again and again, she gives me a different take on one or another of life’s ongoing problems and, and for better or not, illuminates the reality that no matter where we live in this world, our problems are the same.

On page 35 of this book, for instance, Leon writes:  Brunetti suspected he should be troubled, or at least embarrassed by the amusement these phrases provoked in him… but he was not.  Politicians made no discernible sense when they spoke, few doctors used the word ‘cancer’ with patients who had it, and the word ‘immigrant’ could no longer be prefaced by ‘illegal.’  Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

I love that!  “Detach language from meaning…”  I had to stop reading there for a few minutes and ruminate about all the ways we double-speak and use euphemisms to say nothing of our current methods of diminishing language completely by using three-letter abbreviations when we write. Lol!  We seldom say people “die,” for instance; we say we’ve “lost them.”  And how many times have you heard someone describe an art exhibit as “interesting” with overtones that meant something more specific.  Probably.

It’s hard to tell these days why someone “lost his job” or why his “contract was not renewed.”  Was he fired?  Did he screw up?  God forbid we should say it like it is.  It might prevent him from being hired elsewhere so he can… What?  Do the same unnamed deeds.

Part of the Oyster Shell Telegraph?

In some ways, we can get around these problems in a small community.  People from the ‘Big City’ look down their noses at us for spreading rumors on our ‘Oysterville Telegraph’ but, nine times out of ten, that’s where you’ll find the truth.  Meaning manages to reattach itself, but only in the whispered conversations around the edges.

I remember a few decades back when a Board I was on was trying to find a contractor for some painting or roofing job that was needed.  The locals on the Board advised not taking the lowest bid and we were pressed into telling why.  “He drinks,” we said.  This was met by rather huffy shock by the Big City members, we were outvoted, and the lowest bid was accepted.  We local-yokels tried not to smirk when the job was left half-finished due to the contractor having “health issues.”

Brunetti, in Donna Leon’s books, often seeks answers among the everyday people of the city – those who grew up there, who speak the local dialect, Veneziano, rather than Italian.  Those are the people who are “connected” to what’s really going on beneath the surface – the people who know “where the bodies are buried.”  Just like in Oysterville who might have been “told by a little bird”…