Mellifluous.1024Please respect copyright.PENANACr1hT9Vhyo
Hiraeth.1024Please respect copyright.PENANAX6wo92pCaz
Petrichor.1024Please respect copyright.PENANAP61ZQV4Ph8
Limerence.1024Please respect copyright.PENANAoMXNePBnzC
Words are important. Vital. They change things. They create things.1024Please respect copyright.PENANAgcVjc1c0IJ
Sometimes, they even destroy things.1024Please respect copyright.PENANAnVCWeNeDbh
I’ve been fascinated with words since I was a kid.
Enamored.
Captivated.
When I was eight years old, my mom entered me into a young writer contest that was sponsored by the local library in our small town of Dale, Colorado. When they meant “young writer”, they probably should have said young adult, because everyone else who came to sign up was either in middle school or high school. That’s the thing with words: you need to make your meaning clear or things may not go as planned.
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter. Other times, however, the words make all the difference.
Anyway, the overwhelming presence of teenagers in the room didn’t stop my mother at all. As soon as we got home from the library, she dug up her dad’s ancient Smith Corona manual typewriter and settled it on the desk in my little basement room. “Here you go Andy,” she had said. “You want to write? Write.”
I did want to write, and my parents both knew it. See, I was practically born for words. By three years old, I had breezed through most of Mary Pope Osborne’s The Magic Tree House series and had moved on to my dad’s old Boxcar Children books. I loved to read more than most kids love ice cream and cartoons at that age. By the time I hit first grade, I could read and write better than most kids twice my age, and so I skipped a grade. Skipping a grade isn’t like learning to ride your bike; it’s a big deal, and it’s not a simple as you think. Besides, though my reading and writing skills might have been pretty impressive, my math knowledge went about as far as “Sally had two apples and Matt gave her three more; how many apples does Sally have now?” I pretty much sucked at math then, and I still sucked at it well into high school.
So there I was, eight years old and competing against several kids twice my age who had sat through classes upon classes more than I had and learned much more than I had. I didn’t win. No, first prize was awarded to some sixteen-year-old girl who wrote (in my opinion) an overly cheesy love story about some girl with a terminal illness. It was cliché, sure, but I learned then the difference between words we wanted to say and words other people wanted to hear.
Though I didn’t actually win, I did come in third place with my poem about being afraid of the dark. Not of being afraid of the darkness itself, but of the absence of it. When I was a kid, nighttime was magical for me; during the night, I got to dream. Our family didn’t have much money when I was growing up, and I was my own source of entertainment. I wrote of my love of my dreams, and of the darkness that carried them--and it got me twenty-five dollars cash and a brand-new leather bound notebook, the only new thing I had ever owned at the time.
Once my mom discovered my skill with words, she did everything she could to promote it. She bought books by the dozens (an impressive feat, given our financial situation), made sure I always had pen and paper handy, and, probably most important to me, they just let me do my thing. I loved my mom with all my heart for it.
Being a year younger than everyone else in my class was especially tough on a kid like me. More times than I could count I showed up in the kitchen after school, “Star Wars” lunch box in tow, tears tracking my dirt-stained cheeks after being pushed down by the bigger kids yet again. My mom always sank down to her knees beside me and held me gently until I stopped crying, stroking my hair lovingly with one hand, the other wrapped warmly around my back. She worked nights as a waitress at the truck stop while studying to become a nurse, so she was always available to me during the day. No matter what I needed, she would stop whatever she was doing to help me. I thought nothing would ever separate us; my mother’s love made me, an awkward, petrified little kid, feel invincible.
Words can change so much, though.
I will never forget the morning of June third of my sixth grade summer. My curfew, a strictly enforced ordeal, was 8:30 on summer nights. The evening before, my best friend Rick, my neighbor Nova and I were hanging out at the little five-lane bowling alley on the other side of town (you’ll hear more about them later). 8:30 came and went without us realizing it. When I finally arrived home an hour and a half late, my parents had been waiting for me in the living room, both wearing pretty damning expressions. I was right to bed with a promise that they would “decide a fit punishment in the morning.”
I didn’t get much sleep that night. Coming home at 10:00 had the potential to have me grounded for a whole month. Being grounded for a month in the summer is like receiving a forty-year prison sentence; you never know what’s going to have changed when you get out. Your friends might desert you. The girl you like might move away. I simply couldn’t let that happen to me. So, naturally, I did the one other thing that came to me as easily as writing:
I lied.
Lies are like spare change to a writer. We collect them, we exchange them, and we bury them in our closets and behind our bed. They don’t usually hurt anyone, and no one notices them until they pile up and up and up. Here’s some advice about lying: never involve adults in your lies, and make them vague as possible. If someone can retrace your steps through a lie, you’ll never get anywhere.
I broke both of my own rules the next morning. I told my mom that we had been on our way home when Rick fell off his skateboard and busted his arm badly. I told her that I had sat with him on the sidewalk until someone drove by who had a cell phone so we could call Rick’s mom. I told her that I waited with Rick until his mom had shown up, and then hurried home after my friend was safely bundled into the car and on his way to the next town over, which had a little ER clinic.
My mom believed it at first, every word. She gave me a hug, apologized for doubting me, and told me I was a wonderful young man for being so valiant. I felt sick to my stomach with shame, but I didn’t dare admit that it was a lie.
As fate would have it, Rick’s mom called later that day to invite my mom to some ladies’ luncheon. When my mom asked about how Rick’s arm was, all hell broke loose. When the dust settled, I wasn’t grounded for a month. I wasn’t grounded for two. I was grounded for the whole summer, a veritable life sentence to an eleven-year-old. My life was ruined. I was as good as a ghost if I didn’t make at least a couple friends before moving into Gerald Ford Memorial Junior High. That was the one thing I hated about skipping a grade: making friends was all the tougher.
I stomped down to my room, furious, slamming the door behind me. Without a second thought, I jammed a fresh piece of paper into my Smith Corona and punched out the two sentences that I regret the most in my entire life:
I hate my mom! I wish she would die!
Words are important.
Without words, there would be no way to convey the absolute, crippling despair that tore apart my heart when the police showed up on our doorstep the next morning, just over an hour after mom left for work.
Someone had fallen asleep at the wheel and veered into her lane on her way to the hospital to work. The firemen said her death was instantaneous; so was mine, in that moment.
I hadn’t spoken to her before she left for work. I was still mad at my parents for grounding me, even after moping in bed half the night. I was even more mad at myself for getting caught, but it was easier to use my mom as the object of my frustration. My dad stood in the doorway, ashen-faced in disbelief, until one of the officers escorted him to the couch and sat him down.
She was gone. I’d never see those smiling eyes again. Never feel those arms wrapped around me. I felt truly alone for the first time in my short life. I instantly forgot about getting in trouble the day before. Nothing mattered anymore.
Despondency.
Grief.
Anguish.
In a way, I still was grounded for the summer, because after the funeral, I didn’t leave my room until school started that September. That day, I stood in front of my desk and stared at my Smith Corona typewriter, tears streaming endlessly down my face as I wished, harder than I had ever wished before, that I could turn back time.
Words are important. And my last words to my protector and my comforter were of hate. I slid the typewriter, along with a little, wallet-sized photograph of my mom into a cardboard box and put it in the corner of my closet. I didn’t write a single word that summer. In fact, I wouldn’t have written a single word for the rest of my life if it weren’t for school.
Things happen constantly around us, things that we can’t control. A nagging voice seemed to never, ever allow me to believe my mom’s death wasn’t completely and unequivocally my fault. I learned violently that the words we choose have an effect on ourselves, and upon those who surround us.
Words are important.
Vital.
Essential.
They change things. Every single little word, written or spoken, must be chosen carefully.
There can be no mistakes.
I never imagined that, after choosing to shun my own love of words, the words of another would gradually, gently begin to breathe some life back into my devastated heart.
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