Usually it is a snatch of a song or a whiff of an odor that will bring a memory back for me. This morning it was my Merriam-Webster Word of the Day: "enigmatic - of, relating to, or resembling an enigma: mysterious."
As a child, before I could even give language to my feelings, I was quiet, introverted, thoughtful. I liked having secrets. I was a dreamer; a romantic. I didn't know the word for it yet, but I wanted to be mysterious.
"It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key." was uttered by Winston Churchill in a BBC Radio address, The Russian Enigma, October 1, 1939.
It is hard to imagine I went through high school and never heard or read the word enigma, but I must have - either that or it didn't register with me - because I remember exactly where and when I first learned the word.
In the fall of 1967 I registered for two night classes at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids. It wasn't long before I started getting acquainted with my fellow class members. There was a small group of Cedar Rapids firefighters taking the English class I was. We had one fifteen minute break during which we would sit around a table and talk while drinking our sodas.
A mutual attraction developed between me and one of the firefighters. One night he said, "You're something of an enigma, aren't you?" I had no idea what that meant and when I asked him he told me to "look it up." The following week he gave me a poem he had written entitled Ramona in which he had referred to me as mysterious; an enigma. As pick-up lines went, his was pretty darn good.
Nothing ever came of our brief flirtation, but I've never forgotten being called mysterious - nor the meaning of the word enigma. It was an appellation I had been subconsciously looking for since I was a young girl.
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