The Word Collection

My father, being something of a hoarder, collected lots of things—stamps, coins, books, old photographs—you name it, my father had it. He was a collector of collections. Perhaps it was this childhood spent in accumulated junk that has made me love minimalist spaces, bare of anything but a fresh coat of white paint. But Dad insisted we collect something, suggesting it was both a hobby and an investment. You never knew when your collection could be worth something, he told us.

“I will collect words,” I told him when I was eight.

There were two reasons for this. Firstly, words don’t take up any space. I could collect for a lifetime, and never run out of words and never run out of room to keep them. But more importantly, I adore words. Learning to read is, to this day, the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. (Well, that, and my ill-advised affair with a gorgeous French boy, but that’s a different sort of pleasure altogether.)

So I carry around a battered little notebook and whenever I hear something that seems worthwhile, interesting, new or profound, I add it to my collection. And each year, I find one sentence that trumps it all.

Last year, I didn’t think I would find that elusive sentence.  “We are the sum total of our parents,” I read in a book. “Hearts are made to be broken,” my girlfriend Bea told me. “You make everyone you love feel safe,” a friend’s husband said to her. (How lovely a sentiment. Would that I could make someone feel like that one day.) But none of these felt like The One.

Then, at the end of the year, I took up Italian lessons and learnt the most wonderful sentence of all.

“C'è un bar all’angolo.”

It rolls off the tongue, full of unfamiliar sounds. It is a sentence requiring gesticulation.When I say it—c'è un bar all’angolo—I feel foreign and exotic and possibly fluent in Italian, and what a feat that is, to be exotic to one’s own self.

It means, “There is a bar at the corner.”

There is a bar at the corner. How wonderful! How comforting to know that whatever situation we find ourselves in, there is a bar at the corner. As a child, my mother’s sentence was “Let’s make a cup of tea.” It was how she greeted news both joyful and disastrous. From cancer to her first grandchild, my mother’s cups of tea marked every significant occasion of my childhood. To this day, I believe in the improbably curative properties of a hot beverage.

But now I had my own sentence of comfort. “Not to worry,” I told my friend when she called me to say she’d lost her job. “C'è un bar all’angolo.” And then again, when she found a new job, I reminded her that “C'è un bar all’angolo.” It is a sentence heavy with promise, an unlikely collection of vowels that suggest honey coloured sunshine and doe-eyed Italians.

I spoke it sternly to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, right before a big meeting. It calmed my nerves to hear it—as the words rolled off my tongue with the fluency of regular use, I felt like the aloof, disdainful, exquisite Italian women I had come across in Florence and Milan, women for whom uncertainty was surely an alien quality. “C'è un bar all’angolo,” I told myself again, and it sounded almost like a threat.

This year has been a lot more forthcoming. Three days after New Year, I found the sentence.

“It hurts as much as it is worth,” wrote Zadie Smith in an essay for the New York Book Review. The words rolled around in my head for a long time afterwards, and I whispered them to myself as I walked home. The universe felt like a different place after I collected that sentence. Suddenly, the two years I had spent mourning an ex-boyfriend was no longer a waste. Instead, it was a triumph! I had loved someone so much, it hurt for two years.

Later, when I went running (an activity I absolutely loathe but force upon myself to justify the copious amounts of cheese I inadvertently consume), I felt I simply couldn’t go another step—the air was burning into my lungs and my muscles screamed for redemption. “It hurts as much as it is worth,” I reminded myself, and continued up the hill.

So you see, it is not so ridiculous a collection to own, my notebook of words. Over the years, they have provided me with advice, giggles and comfort. They have made me wiser and one day, just as my father plans to leave his collection of stamps and books and coins and photographs to his children, I hope to leave this collection of words to mine. Until then, I share them as needed. Last night, a friend came over in tears, her heart broken by a casual love affair. “It hurts as much as it is worth,” I reminded her gently. But wonderful though that is, she needed more immediate consolation. So I told her, “C'è un bar all’angolo,” and indeed, that was comforting a thought for both of us.