You were advised to look it up and you did so in the dining room. In a real book called a dictionary. A literal weighty tome. It had a picture you could examine while you recited the names: rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum.

You don’t like to look things up. You appreciate new information, but you’ve always found reference books uninviting. So heavy. Not built to be hand-held or lap-mounted, let alone folded back on itself, paperback cover curling around a glued spine. Dictionaries and encyclopedias are always hardbound and table-needy. They want to be propped open on bookstands. No one ever reads them on the bus.

When you were young, your father always made you look words up in the dictionary. He’d use one, you’d ask its meaning, and he’d give you that face so you knew what he was going to say even before he said it. You’d always flounce off to the family room, somewhat exasperated but acting it more than you felt, pull down heavy Volume I or II, depending on whether the word started with A – Mi or Mn – Z, and find it, its derivation and its meaning. You didn’t like the exercise, but the alternative was not knowing what your father’s word meant, and that was worse than looking up the word. Besides, your dad was fair enough to clue you if the spelling was aberrant, like when he told you “psychology” started with a “p” (unlike your friend Karen’s older sister, who called you whores on purpose to make you suffer its spelling).

The fact is, you think the dictionary ought to be broken down into smaller parts. Make it more hand-friendly. Turn it into ten or twelve slim volumes, softcover even, and people will begin to carry them around and browse through them. Those big old dictionaries are holdovers from the days of large scrolls, and the whole subject needs reconsideration.

For that matter, you think we should eliminate all thick paperback books. They make no sense. The whole reason to do paperback is to make the thing portable, and a one-volume Gone with the Wind or War and Peace is completely unwieldy. Break them up into one- or two-inch books!

But this isn’t rumination. Ruminations don’t carry exclamation marks…

You looked up “rumination” and were directly led to “ruminant,” and there was an illustration of a four-chambered digestive system. Rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum.

The dictionary informed you that a ruminant’s stomach has four parts. An animal like a cow takes in grass unchewed, sends it to the rumen or reticulum for a little processing, and then regurgitates it back up into the mouth. There it’s chewed (masticated, really) with saliva, and then it proceeds back down to the omasum and abomasum, the stomach parts that are more like people’s, before entering the intestines on the way to make manure. You did a little more research, and learned that cows can’t even chew the grass; they lack upper teeth, so they tear and scoop the forage into their mouths and down to their rumen, and then they mash the ensuing cud against their ridgy upper gums.

It occurred to you then, that people don’t really ruminate. Cows ruminate for people, turning grass into nourishment. Human rumination is done second-hand, like these words.

It later occurred to you that the cud must taste good to the cow. It can’t be like chewing human vomit, or the cow wouldn’t do it. And according to what you read, the cow spends most of her day at it: pulling grass for six hours, and chewing cud for eight. The process must be deeply satisfying, fundamental, anesthetic, rhythmic:

Hum thunder
Shine lightning
And rain
On my head
Saliva
Is butter
And forage
Is bread

No matter
The weather
I chew
And digest
No question
I answer
I couldn’t
Care less