August 8, 2004

• THINGS THAT REFRESH MY SOUL
  (previous segments)

  Vocabulary

  Well, when I clapped my Sunday morning Gratitude Hat firmly on my head and began to try to think of something starting with V, I realized it was going to be hard like K was. After rejecting vacuum cleaning, vampires, velvet, violence, vested interests, vortex, varsity, and vast open spaces, I finally turned in desperation to the Random House dictionary which appropriately offered up Vocabulary. So obvious. I don’t know if that “sides-of-the-brain” theory is true, but it does seem like I’ve been a word lover all my life and it only gets more so as my vocabulary has expanded into old age. I kind of hope I won’t end up like my Dad doing crossword puzzles, but I think maybe he was trying to fend off the Alzheimer’s that finally overpowered him. Once you’ve been hooked on lines like these – No one knew from whence the strange bird came. Possibly the last hurricane had swept it from an unknown island or from some gulf; or it was born of gigantic seaweeds, or it fell from another atmosphere, from another world, another mystery. Old sailors had never seen it among the ice, nor had any wanderer ever met up with it: man-shaped it was, like an angel, and silent like any poet. – you are just not the same. Then you begin to see the world in this new way where you can turn it in the light and examine it from different angles and reshape it to take the ugliness away – or perhaps to point it out. You can even try other languages to see how the words reflect the culture that uses them and how they translate into your own. You can use words to describe complexities and words to make things simple. Words can get you through doors to magical places and words can bring you calamity and grief. Words can carry you through the night and lead you through the day. And you can learn from them the gift of “the learn’d astronomer” that there are times to rest from words, to “look up in perfect silence at the stars.”
  Deep Thought: There used to be this bully who would demand my lunch money every day. Since I was smaller, I would give it to him. But then I decided to fight back. I started taking karate lessons. But then the karate lesson guy said I had to start paying him five dollars a lesson. So I just went back to paying the bully. Before I paid him, though, I would go into my karate stance, because that’s all I learned before I got kicked out.
  Today I am grateful for: Anyone who tries to write anything
  End of Day – 8:42 pm
  + = Heard that the little lint-looking speck I keep seeing in my right eye that won’t go away for 2 weeks now is probably a “floater” and hopefully nothing serious though I haven’t really looked that up yet.
  - = Got talked into seeing the movie The Notebook which is a serious 12-hanky flick and made my right eye sore trying not to boohoo at all the tearjerking.

  • 10:46 am
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