More Than Words

I'd forgotten just how much I really enjoy words. Writing, specifically, but words in general.

When I was young - my sister had just been born, so I would have been seven years old - one of my favorite books was The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, by Hugh Lofting. It's the second in a series by him of the good Doctor's adventures, but I never read the others. Still, this one volume was easily a good two inches thick, and provided me with more than enough reading material to saturate my young, fertile mind.

I don't know if you can imagine what it was like, for me as a child, to read these fantastical adventures of this pudgy, amicable old man who could remarkably talk to animals. His parrot, Polynesia; the monkey Chee-Chee, the pig Dub-Dub...as stupidly childish as these names are, I didn't care - it was the stories that drew me in, the adventures they had together!

I wanted nothing more than to ride in the shell of the Giant Glass Sea Snail; I wanted to go to Spider Monkey Island, and I wanted to know what the jabizri beetle really looked like. I laughed at the confusion of the Pushmi-Pullyu and the antics of Bumpo the Prince, and yes by golly I wanted to know the mystery of what happened to the great naturalist Long Arrow!

I didn't just love this story, I craved the fantastical adventures it took me on. I must have read and re-read the book a hundred times, and the musical made from it was, and is, always a favorite of mine.

I knew the places it took me too weren't real, but I didn't care - in the pages of that book, I was a world traveller. Even the people in the book refused to believe in the places Doolittle described, but in the end they existed; he was right, they were wrong, and I was right there with him to share in the adventure. The stories, for me, were euphoric; I could, and did, literally find myself lost in each page, flipping them with heated anticipation of what would come next.

I bring this up because I remembered, tonight, how good words - writing, specifically - make me feel.

It's easy to forget things like that. In my case I could blame work, and life, for keeping me so preoccupied that I didn't stop to just enjoy the jumble of consonents and vowels, of verbs and nouns and conjunctions that swam around inside my brain looking for a way out.

And there were quite a few of them.

I tend to write, a lot, in my head; sometimes I'm not completely aware of it. But at times, I find myself sitting and picturing a scene in my head; one that connects to something I've jotted down on one of dozens of note pads, that has some bearing on a story idea that I just haven't felt is ready for paper. The scene comes together like a movie being played inside my skull; I can see each action, and when something doesn't feel right I become a director, yelling "cut!" and telling the actors to try again, only this time...

You get the idea. It's visualization, except I'm taking images and putting them to words. I don't know if other people write this way, but it's how my brain works - and since I'm comfortable doing it that way, I don't really care how others do it. So there.

Tonight, I felt an old itch. I needed to write. So instead of eating at home, I sat down at a local bistro, a blank notebook open on the table and a pen in hand. Nearly three hours later, I looked up from the table - food consumed, but not eaten; beer drank, but not tasted - and smiled, exhausted. I had to force myself up from the table and back home, some 12 handwritten pages of text clutched tightly to my chest. The words had just poured out of me, like a dam that had been full to overflowing; of course, they'd need some cleanup later, but damn! it felt good, just writing so freely again.

Sometimes I look at the world of technology today, and I wonder if tomorrow has a place for words. We spend our days communicating on keyboards that fit in the palm of our hands, we use a shorthand language that I worry, one day, our kids or their grandkids will come to believe is the norm of the English language.

Is the written word dead, as we know it? Does it take a Harry Potter for a child to read, or are the children only reading tales of Hogswarts because their parents are the ones secretly obsessed? Do their sons and daughters only glance at the books, preferring instead to wait for the collector's DVD edition?

I'd like to believe that there are still kids out there, six and seven and eight years of age, who each spring look with anticipation for the summer book clubs, much as I did. That they pour over each book offered for discounted sale, hoping to find something that will transport them over the summer to magical places, to lands never before touched by human foot.

I want to believe that somewhere, right now, there is a child wishing she, too, were riding in the shell of the Great Glass Sea Snail. That there's a boy without a Gameboy, without an iPod, sitting curled up on a bed with a nightlamp by his side, his hands clutching a storybook and his eyes wide with excitement as he reads each line, his mind already transporting him to the lands described in black and white.

And there's a very small, secret part of me that hopes that one day, it'll be my name on the cover of that book.