“Tony, where are you going?” my mother would ask me when I was a boy, as I made my way to where the woods began at the dead-end of our little street. “Oh, no place,” I’d say, and then I’d go there. I think it’s a good and blessed thing to go no place, and I wonder whether children now have the freedom, the opportunity, and the inclination to find where a fine no place may be.
When you are going no place, you don’t have to make sure you’re on time. That’s what you have to do when you show up for baseball practice, or for that great multiplier of sorrows for the sons of men, school. When you are going no place, you don’t have to check a map. GPS can’t direct you, so for a brief and blessed time you are free of that annoying voice that tells you when to turn, as if you were a machine. When you are going no place, you don’t have work waiting for you at the other end, and anyhow, there aren’t any tools specifically designed for doing nothing, nowhere.
To my left as I write these words, there’s a volume from the wonderful Book of Knowledge, a delightfully unusual, even profoundly unusual, Canadian encyclopedia from the old days when there were a lot of children outdoors and indoors, setting off confidently to go to no place. It’s not arranged in alphabetical order. You can find what you’re looking for in the index, and if you want to pursue a subject further, many of the articles will direct you to the next entry on it, usually in the next volume. But the editors just wanted people — especially children — to encounter things by happenstance, just as if you went to no place in the woods, or to no place down the street, or to no place in an old building, or to no place in the old Bookmobile, just to see what you might see. And aren’t the sweetest things in life often what we do not plan, what we have not chosen from beforehand? Isn’t love itself that way? It is good, then, to ramble — our Word of the Week.
’ve mentioned my rambles in the woods, but there are other kinds of rambling, too, and they aren’t to be scoffed at. Sometimes I ramble with numbers. Lately I’ve rambled into an oddball feature of prime numbers and remainders. Suppose you raise a number to the 36th power, and then divide by 37. There are only two possible remainders: 0 or 1. If you raise it to the 18th power, then divide by 37, there are only three possible remainders: 0, 1, and -1 (36). Okay, okay, I’ll stop! Or a kid might say, “What will happen if we put a piece of chewing gum on the light bulb?” I said that when I was five years old, and I found out, and my mother told me to stop it, so I did. Or what happens when you leave a penny in a glass of water? Or how does a coin sound when you twirl it on a table, if it’s silver? You’ll notice that none of these things requires a director. That would take most of the fun out of it, anyway. It would mean Going Somewhere, when the blessed thing is not to do that, but to ramble away, taking your time, whistling (I was a whistler, and still am). Real rambling is in the spirit of play, and play is a lot closer to love and to worship than labor is. Yesterday, I took a saw to a silver oak that I wanted to clear away, and though my back was killing me, I cut it down. It felt a little like play, and a little like work. It was like play, because I did it only to make the grounds prettier and more orderly, for Debra. It was like work, because, well, it was a lot of work. But if I went rambling, who knows where I’d end up? No place!
That’s why Samuel Johnson called his periodical — one essay every Tuesday and Saturday — The Rambler. Not that he had no plan in mind when he wrote an essay, but he didn’t have to pretend to some great design. He could go where he wanted, talking about politics, religion, poetry, morality, human wisdom and human follies. You never knew where the next Rambler was going to take you, and you wouldn’t want to know, either.
he word’s origin suggests what I’ve been ambling around here — it’s probably derived from the Middle English verb romen, to roam. It appears in the 1400’s as ramblen, which is romen, with one of those wonderful “frequentative” or “iterative” suffixes in the Germanic languages, -el (-le) or -er, to describe an action you do again and again, or back and forth. Many of these verbs are felt as slightly jocular or pleasant, according to the character of the action: wiggle, flutter, chuckle, glitter. When you ramble, then, it’s not just that you’re roaming, but that you’re taking your good old lazy time doing it, here, there, even going back to where you just were, perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps because you say, “Now — hey — what was that I just saw?”
You will ask, “But — hey — what about the b?” Well, I’ve mentioned it before, that a b not original to a word will sometimes intrude itself between m and a vowel, or between m and l or r. That’s how they wandered from Latin homo to Spanish hombre. It’s why in English, the thing you put on your thum — the silent b was tacked on later by printers — is a thimble. “But — hey — what about the -le there? A thimble isn’t something you do over and over!” That’s right. The -el (-le) there is a suffix for a tool: see handle, treadle, spindle. Can you think of any other such? “But — hey — I’ve got things to do!” Yes, of course you do! But rambling is sometimes better.
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