The Dictionary of Unloved Words

I’ve been lugging this dictionary around for 40 years, since 1985. It replaced an earlier, much smaller paperback, one that was dog-eared and faded. When I started the third grade, my father came up with the brilliant idea to make me memorize the dictionary, and the Bible, and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. And the Constitution. A dictionary also came in handy for writing my father’s mandatory 100-page essays on why I wanted to be a doctor or a dentist. Did I mention I was in the third grade?

By the time I was in the sixth grade, the principle called me into his office, said there was nothing more they could do for me, that I was merely “taking up space.” My IQ was that of someone in high school, or beyond. He suggested I go to a school for the gifted and handed me a pamphlet.

If it is not obvious from the fact that my father was trying to make me memorize the dictionary, I come from a highly dysfunctional family, so of course I didn’t go. Honestly, I was tired of memorizing words (and their definitions). I began to hate them.

By no stretch of the imagination because I memorized things am I a genius, but this dictionary epitomized my life because there aren’t enough words in it to describe my struggle, and it is the struggle that created me. But this New World Dictionary didn’t come from my father, it came from my maternal grandmother. She gave it to me along with ink pens and paper because she knew I liked to write (and my dad told her I liked to memorize words). Sigh. She didn’t know what I was going through, and that I hated the words.

But she saw something no one else did.

The one person in this world who recognized something in me gave me a book of words. It’s the 40-year anniversary of her gifting it to me. I never forgot that someone once believed in me, four decades ago. I don’t have gold or silver locked up in my fireproof safe (sorry burglars). There is only one thing in there.

A dictionary. That I now love.