The LanyardThe other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionarywhere my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelistcould send one into the past more suddenly–a past where I sat at a workbench at a campby a deep Adirondack lakelearning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyardor wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and againuntil I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy lightand taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift–not the worn truththat you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could bethat this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even. Billy Collins
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More Quotes By Billy Collins
  1. I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow
  2. It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,...
  3. The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time....
  4. I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one,
  5. All they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.
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