Words tend to make their way back

Funny how your words can come back at you.

I’ve been churning out words for more than four decades now. Some good. Some not so good. Some I’m proud of. Some I’d rather have back.

I still have uncomfortable memories of a night years and years ago when, after a service club meeting, after I shook the speaker’s hand, he leaned close to my ear and said, “You called me a liar. I’m not a liar.”

The shock of that moment still resonates in memory.

It took me days of digging through copies of old newspapers to figure out what in the world he was talking about.

Clearly, my words had wounded him. But I had no idea what words were the ones that stung.

And then I found it. The word.

It was in an editorial — go figure — that I’d written about efforts to recruit new physicians to the community. Two doctors had been recruited, but their tenure in Jay County was not successful.

The two doctors were foreign-born. Their names were hard to pronounce. And they had trouble meshing with the community and — especially, it seemed — with the local medical community.

The person I had wounded was a physician as well. He was also a neighbor.

And the word? “Disingenuous.”

That was the word I used to describe the physician’s explanation to the hospital board when he told them that the two foreign-born doctors had moved on.

Don’t bother to look it up.

Essentially, it means that I thought the explanation was less than 100% accurate, that it glossed over uncomfortable facts, that it was incomplete in order to paint a rosy picture.

But that’s not how it was read by the wounded party. He read “disingenuous” and heard, “You lied.”

I’m still conflicted about that one. I meant what I said, but I’m sorry that he took it the way he did. And I’m especially sorry that he carried that wound with him for months before he got around to mentioning it to me that night when he said, “You called me a liar. I am not a liar.”

Sometimes, fortunately, words boomerang back in a positive way.

That was the case last week.

Out of the blue came an email from an old high school classmate, someone I may have dated once upon a time.

She and I were never particularly close. She’d zipped off to Purdue, married, maybe divorced and had lived in several different states.

But I had gotten to know her father late in his life. He and I and my Uncle Jim would get together about once a week for a glass of red wine, some cheese, some crackers and some gossip.

Inevitably, when her father died, I wrote a column about him, a column about our friendship.

But my old classmate had never read it. Until last month.

Her best friend came upon it while going through her own mother’s accumulated clippings and what-not.

The old clipping of an old column was passed along to my old classmate.

And she cried.

Words about her father — who has been gone about 15 years now — still carried their weight, still mattered.

And this time I was delighted that the words had come back.

You never know.