For the past seventeen years or so, when someone asked "What is your favorite book?" my response has been the same: Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs & All. I discovered the book at 17 (coincidentally, exactly half my life ago) on a recommendation from a mentor writer dude who worked with the theatre workshop I did in the summers as an older teen. Yeah, that was long winded.
Well, I still love that book, and re-read it last year and fell in love again with the central characters, Randolph 'Boomer' Petway III and Ellencherry Charles. I jumped right back into the Middle East vs. Midwest debate, the conversation surrounding what is and isn't art and how we know, the divine as feminine/masculine or ungendered save from the gaze that rests upon it. So many things to love, and yet...
I find myself turning from this old text in favor of another book, one that has sold infinitely more copies, one that will never go out of print, one that is most likely in more houses than any other book in pint, one that has more editions than I will ever be able to count let alone peruse in my short life.
I am, of course, talking about the dictionary.
Go ahead. Laugh. I'll give you time.
Still giggling?
Composed yourself?
Good, let's go.
Oh dictionary, how I love you. No matter what mood I'm in, you always have something new to show me, some new word I've never heard of to make my head spin, some etymology that shakes me right down to my flip-flops. I have multiple copies at school, including one on my desk that is part of the game my students know I love to play--Go to the Dictionary. When they ask the definition of a word, rather than give them my own (usually mostly accurate) definition, I say, "Let's Go to the Dictionary!" I want them to learn the proper definition, not just my own that has inevitably been filtered through my own experiences with the word, and I want them to see that there can be real joy in discovering something new each day, even if it's as simple as a definition.
My bedside table has a drawer full of reading material I'm working: magazines, poetry collections, a novel, a book of essays, and yes, a dictionary. Sometimes, for fun, I sit down with it and circle the words I don't know, amazing myself that there are still parts of this language I haven't encountered. And my journal--that little leather limb I carry everywhere--is filled with definitions I've come across, words I've looked up, or terms I want to use as titles.
Tonight, watching the sunlight fade over the fence, the sky a study in pastels, I have my favorite dictionary by my side--a big red mother I got off of a remainder table at Barnes & Noble a few years ago. It is open to the As, pages 8 and 9, beauties like 'acetic' and acidulate,' 'achromatic' and 'acrostic.'
It may be that, after seventeen years, my brain and heart have just about had it with old Tommy boy and skinny legged Salome, or it may just be that, as I get older, my fondness for language and the richness that resides in words has grown, deepening like a wine stain on a linen tablecloth, to a place where I can no longer deem a text 'favorite' unless it is the one that is continually evolving as new words are added and old ones removed.
You see, like me, the dictionary is improving with age, ever watchful, ever watched, ready--when you least expect it--to teach you something new.
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