One Book; Endless Meaning

For those of you who have been following our efforts to raise money to buy dictionaries for all third graders in Detroit-area schools, you may have asked, Why dictionaries? Julie Mattera of The Oakland Press asked all the bloggers involved that very question while researching her article, and I think it’s a fair one.

Why dictionaries? What can one book mean in one child’s life? As you can see from the number of eager hands raised at John F. Kennedy Elementary in Ferndale, our first stop in handing them out, each child has an answer.

I was eight when I received the dictionary I still use today.

It’s the beginning of my fourth-grade year and I wander up to my new teacher’s desk, nose in an E.L. Konigsburg book about a young girl named Claudia who runs away from her home in a suburb, and into the excitement of the city. She is at the age of discovering and testing boundaries.

“What’s a suburb?” I ask.
“You’re standing in one,” my teacher says.
I stare at the carpet, my feet, and then my confused face looks up, and meets her raised eyebrows and constrained grin.
She hands me a dictionary. “Bring it back up when you’re finished,” she says.

But, like Claudia, I got lost in the adventure and forgot.

“I’ve never seen the city lines. Are they real?,” I ask. “Yes,” says one of the girls at my table. “No,” says another.

I discovered boundaries. Invisible lines drawn, defining difference between me and others. Between suburbs and cities. Between children and adults. Between following rules and breaking them. I discovered that learning about new things can make you more confused than when you knew less.

It’s the end of my junior year of high school and I’ve fallen in love for the first time. He plays baseball for Western University and reads Robert Frost to me, and as it turns out, sadly, to many others as well. In the margin of my (okay, so it’s really not mine, and is technically still on loan from my fourth-grade teacher) dictionary, next to the word “frostbitten,” I pencil in my own definition. “To be bitten by Frost. Apparently ‘the path less traveled’ is open to all varieties of riff raff these days.”

Writing my own meaning to that one word was the most defining moment of my young-adult life. I used to take the words that people spoke and stacked them as they fell, like bricks, around me. Suburb. City. Child. Adult. Can. Can’t. But with a pencil and a blank margin, bricks can become feathers, and float away, removing boundaries from our lives.

It’s the winter of my sophomore year of college. I’m looking up a word for a paper that’s due before we wrap for spring break. My finger moves down the page and lingers on a term I happen across. “Hebrides-Group of islands off the west coast of Scotland.” I hand in my paper the next day and board a plane for London. I travel by train with my journal, my toothbrush, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread and a portable CD player that plays the soundtrack of The Brothers McMullen as I cross yet another boundary, and enter Scotland. And though the music is Irish, it gets the job done in the mood-setting department far better than the only other option I’ve packed—which is—I believe—Beastie Boys.

I have learned that one word can inspire huge actions, and wherever your finger loiters, your train will head.

It’s the end of my first year as a copywriter. I spend many lunch hours in the office bathroom with my forehead pressed against the mirror, frustrated with the disparity between my private voice and my public writing. I’ve just learned about blogging and something called Twitter. I hesitate on the sign-up page and ask myself if I’m ready to put my real voice “out there,” as I know there’s no going back once I do. I scroll through the dictionary and stop on the word “Missive-a written message intended to be sent.” I smile, create @MissIve, and send out my first missive, “Have just thrown all my balls into the air.”

If you’re reading this today, if you’ve met me, the odds are good it’s because I found that word, on that day, in that one book, that was handed to me when I was eight.

Why dictionaries? What could one book mean to one child? Hand them one. Then ask them what it means.

Please join Operation: Kid Equip, Erin Rose, Becks Davis, Nikki Stephan, Lauren Weber, and me in putting dictionaries in all our students’ hands, by donating HERE.

All photos courtesy of Becks Davis.