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could gather, yiffniff didn’t have a definition. It was a word that existed solely to be spelled. My father had invented it for that purpose.
    Occasionally some kid in the car—usually, the contentious Dogbite Davis—would make an issue out of yiffniff’s origins. “But you made it up!” he’d tell my father, in an accusing tone.
    â€œOf course I made it up,” my father would reply. “That’s why I know how to spell it.”
    â€œBut it could be spelled a million ways.”
    â€œAll of them are wrong except my way,” my father would say. “It’s my word.”
    If you’re thinking that my father, who had never shared the secret of how to spell his word, could have simply called any spelling we came up with wrong and thus avoided handing out the prizes, you never knew my father. His views on honesty made the Boy Scout position on that subject seem wishy-washy. There was no doubt among us that my father knew how to spell yiffniff and would award the prizes to anyone who spelled it that way. But nobody seemed able to do it.
    Finally, we brought in a ringer—my cousin Keith, from Salina, who had reached the finals of the Kansas State Spelling Bee. (Although Keith, who eventually became an English professor, remembers the details of his elimination differently, I’m sure I was saying even then that the word he missed in the finals was “hayseed.”) We told my father that Keith, who was visiting Kansas City, wanted to go to a Scout meeting with us to brush up on some of his knots.
    â€œWell?” my father said, when the car was loaded.
    â€œYiffniff,” my cousin Keith said clearly, announcing the assigned word in the spelling bee style. “Y-y … “
    Y-y! Using
y
both as a consonant and as a vowel! What a move! We looked at my father for a response. He said nothing. Emboldened, Keith picked up the pace: “Y-y-g-h-k-n-i-p-h.”
    For a few moments the car was silent. Then my father said, “Wrong. Next.”
    Suddenly the car was bedlam as we began arguing about where our plans had gone wrong. “Maybe we should have got the guy who knew how to spell ‘hayseed,’ “ Dogbite said. We argued all the way to the Scout meeting, but it was the sort of argument that erupts on a team that has already lost the game. We knew Keith had been our best shot.
    1986

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    C ALVIN T RILLIN has been a staff writer at
The New Yorker
since 1963. He lives in New York.

ALSO BY CALVIN TRILLIN
    A Heckuva Job
    Obliviously On He Sails
    Feeding a Yen
    Tepper Isn’t Going Out
    Family Man
    Messages from My Father
    Too Soon to Tell
    Deadline Poet
    Remembering Denny
    American Stories
    Enough’s Enough
    Travels with Alice
    If You Can’t Say Something Nice
    With All Disrespect
    Killings
    Third Helpings
    Uncivil Liberties
    Floater
    Alice, Let’s Eat
    Runestruck
    American Fried
    U.S. Journal
    Barnett Frummer Is an Unbloomed Flower
    An Education in Georgia

Copyright © 2006 by Calvin Trillin
    Excerpt from Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin copyright © 2011 by Calvin Trillin
    All rights reserved.
    Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
    R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
    This book originally appeared, in somewhat shorter form, in
The New Yorker.
    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
    Trillin, Calvin.
    About Alice / Calvin Trillin.
    p. cm.
    1. Trillin, Calvin—Marriage. 2. Trillin, Alice Stewart. 3. Authors’ spouses—United States—Biography. 4. Cancer—Patients—Biography. 5. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
    PS 3570. R 5 Z 46 2007
    814'.54—dc22 2006045573
    www.atrandom.com
    This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin. This excerpt