When I was little, I carried a small Merriam-Webster dictionary around in my backpack. I kept another one sandwiched between my Goosebumps and Babysitters Club collections on the bookcase in my bedroom. I hated not knowing the meaning of a word; any time I heard something unfamiliar on television or stumbled over a new word in a book, I turned to the closest dictionary and searched until I found satisfaction in the definition.
Unbeknownst to most of the adults in my life, I also looked up the words I overheard in their “not-for-little-ears” conversations, so I had a pretty, uh, mature vocabulary for an eight-year-old.
While my friends filled their afternoons with sports and video games, I devoured library books in quiet corners and penned dozens of poems and short stories in Lisa Frank composition notebooks. I wanted to be a novelist; a journalist; or any other “-ist” that manipulated words into stories people wanted to read.
Now it’s 20 years later, and I’m a bloggist. Er, blogger.
I don’t know if I say this enough, but thank you for reading. In some small way, you’re part of a dream; imagined by a tiny precocious third grader with feathered bangs and a neon pencil box at-the-ready, filled with Bubbalicious, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers, scented and sharpened #2s, and unicorn erasers.
* These days I keep a link to dictionary.com in my bookmarks bar. Some things never change.
What do you think?