An email from Sam Rittenberg in New York, New York, describes his mother’s use of borrowed day, a term so closely associated with her that her family had it inscribed on her tombstone. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Borrowed Day”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. We received a question from San Rittenberg in New York City, and I wanted to share it in its entirety. He writes,
Our mom was fond of referring to a particularly special day as a borrowed day. It might have been a day in which she was able to spend time with her children and grandchildren, or it might have been a day when the weather was unusually beautiful, or really, it might have been any day that seemed to her to be especially memorable for any reason. The older she got, the more often she would use the expression. Mom was born in 1927 in the small agricultural town of St. George, South Carolina, and spoke with a deep southern accent. At the same time, her family was Eastern European, and it was not uncommon for her parents and grandparent to speak to her in Yiddish.
I don’t think, though I’m far from sure, that the expression came from either of those sources because I don’t remember her using it until the last 20 years or so of her life. I will say, though, that by the time she did pass away, the five of us, her children, so closely identified the expression with her that we put a slightly modified version of it on her gravestone.
Today is a borrowed day may suit many an occasion, but probably not being laid to eternal rest. We settled on every day is a borrowed day, a turn of phrase that represents one of the best parts of her and that surely makes her smile. The thing is that the phrase makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it, but no sense at all if you try to understand it literally. I’ve considered the possibility slash probability that it’s related to borrowed time, which has similar issues if you try to translate it too literally. To whom, for heaven’s sake, am I going to pay that time back, and how?
And Grant, I’m not aware of the expression borrowed day being anything other than probably what Sam is supposing.
No, me neither.
That’s not an idiom or a phrase that’s got any kind of history as far as I know, right?
Yeah.
That’s very lovely though, right?
Isn’t it?
And he’s right. I love that. He put it so well that so much of what we understand about language can’t be examined too closely because it falls apart.
The other thing that this made me think about, well, it made me think about a couple of things. Number one, that Sam observed that his mother used it more and more in the last 20 years of her life. And then I was thinking about the challenge of what to put on one’s gravestone. You know, I was just back in Louisville, Kentucky, and I visited the gravesite of Muhammad Ali, who is buried in the same cemetery as my parents. And I loved what was on his gravestone. It was simply, service to others is the rent you pay for your room in heaven.
Oh, that’s nice.
Isn’t that great? I’m interested to know what people are thinking about in terms of maybe an expression that a parent used, and you’re thinking about putting it on a gravestone.
Yeah, what’s that last line?
Yeah, how do you memorialize someone?
The one in stone.
Right?
How do you memorialize yourself or someone that you love?
Yes.
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